Russia-Ukraine War: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump and the Future of Warfare | Lex Fridman Podcast #504

The following is a conversation with Preston Stewart and Michael Kofman about the war in Ukraine. Preston Stewart is a West Point graduate and Afghanistan veteran who covers the war on his YouTube channel, podcast War and Conflict, and newsletter Defense Tech News. Michael Kofman is a military analysis expert specializing in the Russian and Ukrainian militaries, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, and host of the Russia Contingency Podcast on War on the Rocks. Please follow and support their work. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here are Preston Stewart and Michael Kofman.

1. State of the war in Ukraine

Gentlemen, thank you for doing this late-night conversation. Let’s see how long we go. The war in Ukraine is in its fifth year. Let’s lay out the state of the war in terms of territory, battles, and everything you talk about from a military perspective. Mike, do you want to go first?

Yeah, sure. I think the war probably reached an inflection point last year. Most people recognize that this year is Ukraine’s best year of combat performance on the ground since probably the summer 2023 offensive. But there’s a dichotomy to it: on the one hand, Ukraine is doing really well along the front line, but it faces the challenge of an expansive Russian strike campaign and the cumulative damage inflicted on Ukrainian infrastructure, both energy and all sorts of civilian infrastructure, over the course of several years.

The winter is quite uncertain for Ukraine’s population centers. I know Ukraine has proven resilient and is going to get through this winter, but the level of damage to the economy remains unclear.

The Russian military is doing quite poorly this year. For them, this is probably their worst year of combat performance since the winter of 2023. The way they’ve been fighting has reached diminishing returns, not in 2026, but probably as far back as the summer of 2025. They increasingly face manpower issues, and their effort now focuses more on strategic bombardment. While inflicting a lot of damage on Ukraine, strategic bombardment has historically had a challenge: it does not have a great, or even good, track record of achieving maximalist political aims in a war, especially if a ground campaign is unsuccessful or floundering, as Russia’s is at this stage of the conflict.

The history of strategic bombardment as a way to try to win a war in the absence of success in other efforts is not a good one. As an analyst, I’ll tell you that most political leaders always think it might work for them, even if you tell them it doesn’t. So it’s unsurprising to see Russia now leaning heavily toward strategic bombardment as a key pillar of its strategy.

I think it would also be nice to lay out the basics every time you bring them up. Maybe you can give a quick tangent on the 2023 offensive, and then explain what strategic bombardment is as opposed to the other mechanisms of war?

Sure. In 2023, there were a series of fairly set-piece offensives and counteroffensives. After a partial mobilization, with manpower replenished and some reserves established, Russia attempted a winter offensive, but its forces were unready. The Russian winter campaign in 2023 was largely a failure, perhaps with the exception of the grinding battle over the city of Bakhmut.

Then Ukraine launched a much-anticipated summer offensive using units that had been freshly trained and equipped by Western countries. A great deal of hope and expectation was placed on this offensive, but it too failed. It lasted several months. In reality, I think it went from June 2023 until about November 2023.

Then Russia tried to seize the initiative again and started its own offensive in fall 2023 with the Battle of Avdiivka. Summer 2023 is one of the periods where we still see an exchange of initiative between the two sides and fairly clear-cut major offensive and counteroffensive operations. Early in 2023, you have a failed Russian winter offensive. Fall 2022 through winter 2023 was probably one of the worst points for the Russian military in the war. Then you have the Ukrainian summer 2023 offensive, where Ukraine does gain some ground, but not what people hoped for.

Since then, for much of the war, you see Russia trying to establish—and having—an advantage in manpower and materiel. For much of 2024 and 2025, Russia tends to have the initiative, even though it’s largely pursuing a grinding offensive on a very broad front.

If I fast-forward and take us into 2026, you really start to see the inflection point around fall 2025. In 2026, the Russian effort is quite floundering, and Russian forces face significant reversals, with the battlespace a lot more dynamic this year. Ukraine has 2 of its own localized offensives running, and you see much greater fluidity on the battlefield in 2026, certainly at the tactical level, than in 2025 or 2024.

There’s often a perception that it’s just a positional stalemate. But even more recently, some of Ukraine’s offensive operations have gained more terrain than Ukrainian forces were able to take during the summer 2023 offensive, which was planned to be a much bigger operation.

It might also be useful to state what’s perhaps obvious: the nature of this war, and one of the things that changed as it evolved, is the role of drones on the front. Maybe this is where you can loop in strategic bombardment as well. What are the main mechanisms of war here?

We look at this war beyond what’s happening at the front line. From the very beginning of the war, Russia has had a series of strikes, an expansive strike campaign. But it really began in fall 2022, when they started launching combination strikes of long-range air-launched cruise missiles and short-range ballistic missiles against Ukrainian critical infrastructure.

By critical infrastructure, I mean power plants, substations, various types of heating plants, things that a country needs to sustain its economy and population. Over time, those targets expanded. Russia targets various types of civilian infrastructure. At this point in 2026, we’ve seen that campaign broaden to include warehouses, data centers, schools, medical facilities, malls—quite a few shopping malls in the last few months—and trains. It’s gone far beyond energy infrastructure to include a host of other civilian targets.

Over time, the campaign changed from being conducted primarily with cruise and ballistic missiles to mostly using saturation strikes with large numbers of one-way attack drones. Those drones have evolved, too. They’ve gone from cheaper, easier-to-shoot-down propeller-driven drones to jet-powered ones that are, in effect, light ground-launched cruise missiles, as well as a much larger number of ballistic missiles, some of which are more sophisticated.

Ukraine has been facing both large combination strikes and daily sustained pressure: constant attacks with jet-powered drones that generate alerts, disrupt economic life, and try to exhaust Ukraine’s air defense.

By the way, I forgot to mention that I’m a big fan of both of yours. It’s an honor to have you both here, Mike and Preston. Preston, I’ve been watching you for a long time, so thank you for being here. To build on what Mike was saying, can you also speak to some of the geographic areas that are in question, the ones most contested?

Yeah, absolutely, Lex. It’s an honor to be here. It’s always a challenge to add anything to what Mike has to say, but I’ll give it a shot. I think it’s good to get an idea of the areas we’re going to be talking about.

In Ukraine, the fighting is still predominantly in the east and the southeast. Kyiv, kind of in the middle of the country, is not facing direct Russian attacks in terms of infantry and short-range drones. Of course, it’s on the receiving end daily of long-range drones and missile strikes.

As you move through the border region, starting in the north, there are Russian infiltrations in Sumy. There’s also fighting in Ukrainian territory in Kharkiv. Then you get down into what’s known as the Donbas—Luhansk and Donetsk—where some of the heaviest fighting throughout the war has taken place. This is an area referred to as the Fortress Belt that Ukraine has turned into an absolutely brutal place for Russia to try to advance through. It’s costing Russia a lot of people day in and day out. Moving from there, we’re into Zaporizhzhia, and then Kherson, which abuts the Black Sea.

And some of the strategic bombardment Mike was talking about happens beyond even these areas. Kyiv is being hit, so a lot of places throughout Ukraine are being hit.

And some areas in the western portion of the country, though not as frequently. Kyiv is a focus.

If you look along the front today, you have essentially some Russian border incursions trying to establish a small buffer across the border. Those are lower-intensity areas of fighting in Sumy and Kharkiv.

You have ongoing fighting around the city of Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region. The focus of Russian offensive efforts, as Preston was saying, is still trying to take the remainder of the Donbas. That fighting ranges from areas around cities like Lyman all the way to the main conglomeration of cities that remain in the Donetsk region. We should mention them now because I think they’re going to come up: Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, and Kostiantynivka, which troops colloquially call Kostya because its name is too long.

Further west is Dnipro, a main city that has essentially been an anchor in Ukrainian defense, west of that conglomeration, with another chain of cities behind it. If we head southwest, we get into the Dnipro region and then Zaporizhzhia. Zaporizhzhia is an interesting, fairly dynamic area because both Russian and Ukrainian forces are on the offensive at the same time. Russian forces are trying to push west of Huliaipole, while northeast of there, Ukrainian forces have had the initiative for much of the year. A tactical grouping of Ukrainian Air Assault brigades has been running a creeping offensive there and has been pretty successful in making gains.

The other area we might get into later, around Lyman, is where Ukraine’s Third Corps conducted a successful offensive operation called Vihod. Those are 2 areas where Ukraine is not only contesting the initiative, but actually liberating territory and, in many ways, wiping out Russian gains from 2025. That’s what I meant when I said earlier that this is a much more dynamic battlespace than people think, and that territory is a lot more fluid.

There’s a vast gray zone between the 2 lines. Ukraine does not hold cohesive defensive lines. It often has essentially pickets, with a small number of infantry marking positions, but much of the territory is contested. The battlespace is defined by dense drone coverage and a sizable engagement zone, which varies from place to place. You might say it’s roughly 15 kilometers forward and back from the front line, although in some areas it’s more, and in others it’s less. It depends.

In reality, it becomes more of a gray zone. As Preston was saying, Russian forces try to get past this drone engagement zone, or kill zone, through infiltration. That’s their main challenge: getting past it with individual infantry or light motorized attacks on motorcycles and ATVs. They try to get as far behind Ukrainian positions as they can. Ukraine is largely defending with a combination of prepared defenses, minefields, and a large array of drones and drone units that engage Russian forces before they even reach the Ukrainian forward line of troops. If they get past that point and the initial Ukrainian positions, Ukrainian drone units pick them up there. In many respects, it’s a zonal defense.

We should unpack that a bit because people see this as a drone war, and the statistics out there do show that drones inflict 80% of the losses. However, it’s really a combination of things. The dynamic involves traditional defense and minefields, which make it very hard for mechanized or light motorized assaults to break through. Artillery still plays a role on the battlefield because it forces enemy forces to disperse; it has a shaping dynamic. Even if you don’t use it much, its presence makes it hard for troops to concentrate or suppresses them. It slows them down in the assault, making them easy targets for drones.

Artillery is still relevant because drones also have their own limitations. There are 2 periods of the year when they often have seasonal limitations: spring and fall, and again in the winter, because the weather becomes poor. You get high winds and rain. Drones don’t work nearly as effectively during poor weather, so artillery is a very important backup. If you just had drones and nothing else—no minefields, no artillery—I don’t think Ukraine would be able to hold the terrain this effectively with the low density of forces, the number of men they currently have deployed. It’s important to describe this as a combination of means, even if drones play such a central role, so folks don’t ignore the interaction of these different capabilities in Ukraine’s approach.

2. Drone warfare and the kill zone

So sorry to linger on the basics, but can we lay out what artillery is? It’s big guns. What’s the role of individual infantry? What’s the role of tanks? What is this gray zone? What does it actually look like? How many drones are floating above? What does it look like for an individual infantry soldier to run through that, as Preston was saying? Can you paint a picture of some of the basic things here?

Not good to run through that. It’s terrifying. There are constant eyes in the sky. To walk this out a little bit, artillery generally means 105- or 155-millimeter cannons. That’s what we use here in the United States. It’s primarily what Ukraine has been using now as it shifted over to a NATO standard. You’re talking about a range of 20-ish kilometers, which at one time was significant. There was a phase in this war when that seemed to determine the direction it was going to go: who had more artillery, and who could mass fires in certain directions.

It’s changed so drastically now that drone range has pushed artillery further and further back. Cannons are on the battlefield. Some are dug in, in entrenched positions; others are mobile, on tracks or wheels, because they have to get out of there. As soon as they fire, there are so many drones overhead watching them.

There are a number of drones being used on the battlefield. Reconnaissance drones are where everything starts. For the most part, those are big fixed-wing drones that can stay airborne for quite a while. They’re generally low-cost, and that’s been a dynamic we’ve seen with both Russia and Ukraine in this war: they’ve gone from very few, high-cost, perhaps larger drones, to a ton of low-cost, borderline attritable ones. They don’t want to lose all these drones, but it’s not that big of a deal to lose one compared with, say, a U.S. Predator or Reaper that costs more than $20 million.

They have these reconnaissance drones up constantly. Both sides have them. When they spot something, that information is passed along to the appropriate drone unit, and it’s engaged based on what they have available. The most common ones we see in the media, and the ones that get the most attention, are FPV drones. Those are small quadcopters. You see them flying at 12 or 18 inches; I think they might get up to 20 inches at times. Generally, there’s a munition attached to the end. They crash it into something, and it detonates.

They can swap that out for anti-personnel munitions or go after vehicles or fortifications, and they can do that on the spot. There are mountains of these FPVs. There was a picture of Kim Jong Un of North Korea walking through a hallway of stacked FPVs. These are very small, low-cost, attritable drones, and they’re being used. The numbers are staggering.

I’d say for FPVs, it’s probably somewhere around 8,000 to 10,000 per day, just those, not including other types of tactical drones. That would be for one side of the war. That gives you a sense of how hundreds of thousands of these are being employed per month. These strike capabilities exceed all the numbers of personnel and equipment on the battlefield by a very substantial amount.

Just to clarify, behind every FPV drone there’s a human being operating it. There’s also a sense from the news that autonomy is being used. It is not. This is something you guys talked about: there are usually humans behind the drones.

I’ll be frank: most of the systems in this war are remotely operated, but they’re operated by people. It is actually quite manpower-intensive. In fact, in many cases, both the Russian and Ukrainian militaries had to build out substantial numbers of drone units and channel manpower into the drone component of the fight.

It’s not even a ratio of 1 to 1, one person to one drone. A typical drone team might require 2 or 3 people. You have a pilot and a co-pilot or navigator. This is exhausting, tiring work. I’m not saying that other traditional missions are easy, but with a drone, you have to look at a screen the whole time, all day. You have to fly it; it’s very intensive. Somebody else has to navigate. Another person might be the technician or the person who arms the system.

Almost all the systems in this war are remotely operated, whether they’re flying drones, one-way attack strike drones, or UGVs, uncrewed ground vehicles. They require considerable support. At the end of the day, these are physical objects that require equipping and troubleshooting. Like most things in war, they don’t necessarily work well or right out of the box. That’s what a lot of people don’t necessarily appreciate about military affairs: a lot of things don’t work as intended on the battlefield. Somebody has to be there to fix it and check it.

The bottom line is that it is actually quite manpower-intensive. There is a degree of semi-autonomy: terminal guidance and targeting at the very last point, or maybe the pilot can hit a box over a vehicle, and then the drone knows that’s what it should go after.

And ways that drones can overcome enemy electronic warfare or jamming with this kind of terminal guidance. But most of these use cases make up a tiny percentage of the overall fight and the overall number of drones being employed in this war. I hate to take away from the autonomy and artificial intelligence conversation. This war is testing that, and there are plenty of areas where I see it being tested, but to some extent, it’s been overhyped in terms of the percentage of the fight that’s actually being run that way. It is very much still a human-centric war, with a lot of manpower involved in running, operating, and maintaining all of these capabilities.

So one of the other novel aspects of this war is that so much of it is televised. You can see videos from the drone perspective, on both sides, of a drone killing another human being. One misconception I heard you talk about is that it takes one drone to accomplish that task, and it actually takes a lot more. Can you speak to that in terms of the number of drones it takes to accomplish a particular task, like destroying a piece of technology or—I don’t know the right way to speak about this—

That’s it.

—but killing another person.

Yeah. “Eliminate a target” might be a cold way of saying that. We’re in an interesting place where there’s a lot of propaganda value in footage for anybody using it in any military right now, in a way we didn’t have access to even just a few years ago. There’s a lot of interest in being able to show what happened. We’ve seen now that people won’t take reports that something happened unless there’s a video of it, which is insane. A few years ago, you would never have expected to have video of a missile strike in Crimea on a Russian airfield. Now, if there’s no video, maybe it didn’t even happen.

The expectation is there, and countries are meeting it by being able to say, “Look, we penetrated your defenses. Look what we did,” or, “Look at all the soldiers we killed as we were making this approach.” So it’s out there. Only a tiny fraction is made public in the first place, and of those, only a tiny fraction actually accomplishes the mission. Drones’ batteries run out, they get jammed, and all of a sudden the screen just goes dark. Sometimes they impact and don’t detonate. There are all sorts of little things like that. That footage doesn’t make it out.

It creates the perception that one $300 drone or one $500 drone is eliminating a tank, and that’s not happening. Maybe with the right munition and a lucky shot, when the tank isn’t expecting it, it’s possible. Realistically, we’re seeing 10, 20, and I think upwards of 30 of these small drones being used at times to actually eliminate a tank.

So we should imagine a very large number of FPV drones just hunting humans in tanks and technology.

The problem with understanding the ratios is that the videos have a strong anchoring effect, and the videos are all videos of successes. There are no videos of misses. Unless you’re actually there and able to collect the data, you don’t know what percentage of hits—or what percentage of drones launched—really that is. You might easily get the impression that 100% of the drones launched hit. As Preston said, that’s very far from the case, so you need quite a few drones.

For people, even though on videos it looks like a one-to-one ratio, it’s often not. I think it’s often a lot closer to maybe five drones or something like that.

Per person?

Yeah, in practice. I’ll be frank: I’ve seen videos myself that aren’t public. In the most extreme case, I saw one on a field trip in July where it took 12. For tanks, the most extreme example I heard of was a well-armored, protected Russian tank with electronic warfare—one of these tanks that looks like a large barn because it’s so heavily protected. Last year, it took 79. That’s an extreme case, but in most cases, as Preston said, it’s about 30 to 40. For an infantry fighting vehicle, it’s about 15, maybe 15 to 20, depending. Some percentage of drones get jammed and don’t make it to a target. Some percentage may fail to detonate. So it’s quite a few.

In talking to folks who are trying to return mobility and maneuver to the battlefield, and who specialize in drone-enabled mechanized assault, with both mechanized units and drone units supporting them, a mechanized company that goes on the attack now expects to take close to 300 hits in that assault. They expect vehicles to take quite a few hits, and most to be able to withstand them. So it does take quite a few drones, but it’s very difficult to overstate the sheer saturation of drones out there.

So given that, what does a battle look like? How do you gain territory given these drone units, this huge number of drones, this gray zone, and artillery and tanks, like you mentioned? How do they work together to do something like gain territory?

Well, they’re doing it differently now. We’re seeing a very different approach from Ukraine than from Russia. I can try to speak to the Russian part, if you want to take the Ukrainian offensive here in a second. Russia has defaulted to more of an infiltration tactic. Rather than using large formations that get spotted 10, 20, 30 kilometers from the front and then hunted down with long-range drones, they stopped doing that because those formations don’t even get the opportunity to get near the front line.

We started to see Russia move towards more motorized assaults with just pickup trucks, ATVs, and a lot of motorcycles for a while. Now it’s mostly individual infantrymen. They have checkpoints on a map. They’re released and sent forward 5, 10, or 20 kilometers, trying to move to a forward location where they can consolidate. The Ukrainian lines look clean on a map, but they’re not. A lot of gaps are held with overhead drone coverage to monitor approaches, and the Russians get through. One is a bit of a headache; three become a bigger problem. All of a sudden, they’re harassing supply lines, forcing Ukrainian units and drone pilots to move back a little, which opens up the battlefield for more Russian soldiers to come forward.

There’s a reason the lines are moving so slowly right now. That infiltration is incredibly costly. We talked with an American volunteer, a Marine fighting with the 1st National Guard Corps in the Dobropillia direction a little over a year ago. He described this as an incredible tactic if you don’t care about losing soldiers. He said, “It’s great. You can just chew through terrain. You can get there eventually. You’re just going to lose 90, 95% of your guys along the way.” That’s generally what we’ve seen from Russia over at least the last 6 months, maybe a full year. Ukraine has been going about it differently, especially with some of its recent counteroffensive operations.

The way I look at it is that, first, in 2025 this war really began to be much more of a tug-of-war over who has superiority in the drone engagement zone, which forces locally call the kill zone. The side that’s able to suppress the other side’s drone units through drone strikes and traditional artillery strikes—and, for Russia, through the heavy use of glide bombs launched by Russian fixed-wing aircraft—is then able to push the other side’s drone support farther from the front line. By displacing it, that side can actually advance.

A lot of it has been a tug-of-war over who has superiority in drones and fire support. Increasingly, on the Ukrainian side, successful offensive operations come from having a very well-thought-out plan to set the conditions for the operation: suppress Russian drone units, interdict logistics behind those units so they don’t get sufficient supplies, and figure out how to channel them by pushing them into certain zones of operation. Then you can localize and figure out where they’re going to be and when you’re going to do the assault. You have a coordinated strike plan to suppress them during the assault, and then you’ve established the conditions for your forces to advance with some mobility and dramatically reduce their losses.

Ukraine can’t afford to fight the way Russia does. It doesn’t have the manpower, and even if it did, it’s not a question of numbers; it’s a question of culture. Ukraine would not treat its forces in the same way. It wouldn’t accept those kinds of losses among its own troops. You’ve seen a couple of different approaches on the Ukrainian side over the past year, with different assault units experimenting. Some advanced drone assault units, like CODE 9.2 and the 1st Separate Assault Regiment, often work together. They use a combination of drones and well-equipped, adapted mechanized formations to try to return maneuver to the battlefield and take terrain more quickly, rather than with a slow-moving, grinding, creeping offensive.

You’ve seen approaches all the way down to the opposite end of the spectrum: air assault brigades effectively employing three-man fire teams with drone support, systematically clearing tree line by tree line. It’s slow and steady, but it keeps their casualties low. This is in the south, in Zaporizhzhia. On a broad front, over the course of this year, they’ve taken back a significant amount of terrain.

There are a bunch of other methods in between. I wouldn’t say there’s been one method, but different units are experimenting with different ways of doing it.

On the Russian side, as Preston said, it’s a combination of mechanized and light motorized assaults. Increasingly, Russians are using mechanized assaults simply to consume the attention of Ukrainian drone units, to distract them or get them to focus on the mechanized assault so light motorized assaults can get through and past their initial positions. These are soldiers on motorcycles and ATVs, and even, believe it or not, I’ve seen Ladas and things of that nature.

For the infiltration side, like literally soldiers on motorcycles, trying to gain position so they can then attack the supply chains and force Ukrainian forces to push back?

Let me take a minute to explain why that can be a challenge for Ukraine. It may sound a bit preposterous to someone listening, so let me explain why it can pose a challenge and why light motorized attacks have sometimes proven more successful than traditional mechanized attacks.

Mechanized attacks involve a small number of vehicles. Typically, the leading vehicle has a big trawl to clear mines. Ukrainian drones can easily gang up on it and start isolating the column. Light motorized attacks involve a whole number of soldiers. It could be 100 motorcycles, or more, trying to use speed to overcome this sort of engagement zone.

The reason that can sometimes be an issue, even though most of them get taken out—I want to be clear, most are not successful—is that Ukrainian forward positions are often three-man posts. They’re not even really firing-position observation posts; they’re essentially pickets, with considerable separation between them, sometimes several hundred meters. Ukraine might have three of these for a kilometer. That means there’s considerable space between them, so you could drive through. Behind them there might be secondary positions, but they’re still pretty sparse.

Most of the units involved in the fight are essentially supporting units: different types of fire support, drone support, traditional artillery fires, logistics, and so on. Many Ukrainian units don’t really have the manpower to launch a counterattack if Russian forces break through. Some do, and have a quick-reaction force ready, but some don’t necessarily have the manpower. So it can be a challenge if units get through and begin to accumulate.

That’s how infiltration works for Russia, even though it’s incredibly costly. You can imagine 10 soldiers going forward: seven don’t make it, but three do, and they find the path between positions. Now the people who sent them know this is the gap in Ukrainian positions, and they can daisy-chain the next group down that path.

Somewhere behind Ukrainian lines, there are now three Russian troops, but maybe it’s five, six, or seven. They’re accumulating. Three to five kilometers behind those positions, you’re reaching the first drone reconnaissance units flying Mavics. They’re not prepared to receive an enemy assault team. They’re flying drones. So this is already an issue, because if Russian assault troops—only three, four, or five of them—are operating in your depth, Ukrainian units may try to hunt them down. If they let any number escape and those troops get to the drone units, then you start losing your drone units and support personnel. It’s a real issue in the battlespace.

That’s essentially how infiltration works over time, although it’s incredibly costly for Russia. It’s a grim calculus. But it’s also a combination of trying to fight for superiority in drone employment overall. Who has more drones? Who has more drone units in the fight? Who has more fire support? Who’s able to suppress whose drone units to allow their offensive tactics to have some purchase and success?

I guess I should also ask: what kind of drones are we talking about? I just pulled out the DJI Mini 5 Pro. How many drones like this are there? I should also mention that some of them have a cable, right? A fiber-optic cable. Preston, you’ve talked about this throughout all of this. At first you were skeptical when you visited, but then you saw the wisdom and effectiveness of fiber-optic drones.

The fiber optics are terrifying in a lot of ways. The Mavics are still utilized. All things considered, they’re relatively expensive compared to some other systems Ukraine has, and they’re not manufactured in Ukraine. A lot of what they’re using right now, they’re building themselves.

FPVs are a bit bigger than that, but the term “drone” is so broad right now. It describes everything from very big systems—effectively missiles that Russia is firing, and Ukraine is firing into Russia, the size of cars—to very small ones and everything in between.

The fiber-optic one is interesting. One of the major defenses against drones, which we use in the U.S. military, is jamming: electronic warfare that makes it so these munitions, or anything else, don’t function in a certain area. I think Russia originally did it—Mike can correct me here—but they certainly rolled it out relatively quickly. They attached a very thin fiber-optic cable that spooled out of the drone back to the operator. That brought the signal internal, and the jammers stopped working. So all the electronic warfare in the world isn’t doing anything. That drone flies directly through it.

The limitation is that there’s a cable behind the drone. As thin as it is, it has some weight, which means a smaller payload or a shorter distance the drone can fly. The cable can get hung up at times. Russia rolled that out, Ukraine quickly matched it, and it’s a serious threat right now at longer and longer distances. I think we’ve seen them reach around 50 kilometers at this point.

The first time I heard this, it didn’t compute in my head. You just said 50 kilometers. That’s a very long cable. It’s a drone connected by a cable. It didn’t make any sense to me that this could be a reality.

Maybe this is a good place to ask about the nature of war, which is figuring out different technologies that are actually effective on the ground. It’s figuring out what works, even if it seems crazy.

I know.

As Preston said, Ukrainians initially experimented with them but didn’t adopt them. Then Russia started adopting them pretty heavily after employing them in Kursk. When Ukraine had the Kursk offensive, that’s when Russian units really started using fiber-optic cables. They saw them as effective.

I’m demonstrating this as an example of a case. Once they saw it was quite effective and impossible to jam—you literally have a cable attached to a drone that the drone lays behind itself as it flies—they adopted it.

Think of it like a very thin fiber-optic filament, like the line on a fishing reel.

It’s about that width, too. It’s very thin.

It’s very thin, and it’s a spool like a reel on a fishing rod. That’s literally what the thing is. It’s a spool, and the cable comes out behind. You have to fly it carefully and slowly. You can’t fly it like the drone you had here, the Mini 5 Pro. You have to be more cautious because you have to think about how the cable is being laid on trees, roads, and other things. You have to remember that you have a cable, not a radio signal, connecting you to it. Nonetheless, it’s quite effective.

Then it spread from the units using it in Kursk because other units saw it as a successful practice. Once people see something that’s effective, they say, “I want to try that, too.” Then it spreads to other units. As Russians were using it, Ukrainian units began adopting it as well, though not at the same rate.

Fiber-optic cable drones are still a fairly small percentage of the overall tactical strike drones used. I’m not sure—I hate to say I’m making this number up—but I think it’s 15% or less overall. That said, they play a very important role because you can’t jam them, and they’re much more difficult to detect.

Ukrainian units commonly have systems for detecting drones flown via an analog radio signal, because it’s open and easy to intercept. One type, for example, is nicknamed the Chuyka. I’ve always had one in the vehicle when driving. There are three antennas coming out of it, which receive signals on three different frequency spectrums.

If a drone using an analog radio signal is closer to you than to the operator, its signal strength can be stronger to you. You can start to receive the signal from it, and you have a little screen where you can see the video feed of an enemy drone coming. With a fiber-optic cable drone, you have no warning because you can’t receive that signal.

The way I look at it is that there’s been about a three- to four-month cycle of evolution in technology and tactics in this war between Russian and Ukrainian forces, and they iterate fairly quickly. Both sides have enough defense-industrial capacity, enough capital, and enough folks working on this that if one side is using something and it’s shown to be effective, they assume and anticipate the other side will begin to imitate it and adopt those technological capabilities.

Usually, the interaction between the two—and I’m broad-brushing here—is that Ukraine has often led in tactical development and bottom-up innovation. Ukrainian units experiment on their own. They’re all kind of defense startups, with their own R&D sections and defense shops or companies building drones for them.

Technology tends to bloom. I remember when electronic warfare was really exploding in 2023 and 2024, and people were calling it an electronic warfare jungle because all these different systems were appearing. Ukraine tended to innovate faster. The Russian military was slower, but Russia had more capacity in some ways and tended to be better at scaling a solution once they identified it. That was Ukraine’s frustration: once the Russian military saw that Ukraine was doing something well, it would allocate capital and industrial capacity, scale it, and deploy it across the force in a standardized way a bit faster.

If I can add something to this, Lex, it’s an aspect we just kind of—Mike did it here, and I do it all the time, too—you rattle it off like it’s normal, and it’s so far from normal. The Chuyka drone detector looks like an old Game Boy. It has a screen on it. You’re driving down the road in Ukraine, watching the screen, and it turns on. It’s the enemy’s view from the drone.

Is it your vehicle or a different vehicle?

For soldiers in tree lines, they might be watching and trying to decide, “Does that drone see us? Do we need to move? It doesn’t see us. It’s looking the other direction.” They’re literally watching the feed of the Russian soldiers who are hunting them. Just about everybody along the front has one right now. It’s a weird dynamic that’s brand-new to war.

It beeps when it picks up the signal. When you’re holding it, it’s not a pleasant feeling for everybody else in the vehicle to see it beeping and picking up the signal from the enemy drone. I’ve had people see me looking at the screen—the small screen of the enemy drone—and then look to the right at their surroundings to see, “Is this close to me? Is it looking in the same area or not?” It’s exactly as Preston describes it.

There’s a surreal aspect to this. It feels almost like a video game, with real-life, life-and-death consequences. The soldiers on both sides are looking at screens, and then the whole world is looking at the screens that the soldiers are filming. It feels like the nature of war is completely different. Can you speak to the degree this war represents modern warfare and the future of modern warfare, and to what degree it represents a leftover from the old way of fighting wars?

I think we’re at a transition point right now. This war represents Russia and Ukraine. It’s not representative of what every war in the world would look like if it sparked today, tomorrow, or next year. There are unique aspects to this. The lack of air superiority on Russia’s part plays a major role in how the battlefield looks today. That may or may not be the situation the U.S. military or NATO would face in another conflict.

We haven’t seen this in our lifetime. When people are fighting for their lives day in and day out, they tend to come up with really good ways to stay alive and really good ways to kill the enemy—ways they don’t come up with when they’re between wars and thinking about what might be a good solution. We’re seeing rapid innovation in both Russia and Ukraine. These are modern economies with modern technology, and we haven’t seen this in my lifetime. The Taliban were innovating. Al-Qaeda was innovating. ISIS was innovating. The enemies we fought were innovating, but they didn’t have the scale or the technology to do it. I think we’ve jumped decades in terms of what warfare will be in a very short period of time because of where it’s playing out.

As a thought experiment, how would the United States military fight this differently, if there were no nuclear weapons on the table? You said something about air superiority. What does that mean?

Air superiority is the ability to conduct operations in an airspace pretty much at will. It was very similar in Iraq and Afghanistan: we had air power overhead at all times. Our aircraft were really at no risk of being shot down or even suppressed to the point that they couldn’t carry out operations. What you’re seeing in Ukraine right now is air denial. Neither side is flying aircraft into enemy territory, and that’s been the case for a long time.

The U.S. military is very much built around air power and delivering long-range precision munitions, including munitions from B-1 and B-2 bombers, onto enemy positions.

As a small tangent, which branch of the military is responsible for drones? I’d love to know: you were at West Point. Are there courses now on drones and drone warfare?

They’re getting there.

Is that part of the Air Force? Is that part of air power? Does that count as air power, or not?

We’re figuring it out, I think, is the best way to put it. This is happening so fast. They haven’t had the opportunity to create new courses and put cadets through them for three or four years, because there’s new technology now that wasn’t necessarily being used just 18 months ago. The Pentagon is working on this. We’ve seen a lot of press releases and positive statements about the direction we’re headed.

There’s a Drone Dominance Program right now that the military is spearheading, trying to identify small manufacturers that can be agile and come up with new solutions to field to the broader force. We’re trying to catch up in a lot of ways. I don’t know that there’s an answer yet about who owns it. It seems like everybody’s got a little piece of it. That’s part of what we’re trying to work through right now.

But the U.S. military is embracing these new small drones. To what degree is this an intermediate stage of having these kinds of ad hoc drones? Is this an intermediate stage of something else that’s coming, or is this going to be the new way of fighting these kinds of wars?

That’s a good question. There’s debate about whether an analogy might be the aviation of World War I, where we see the Russia-Ukraine war as a transitional war, as Preston described it. It starts off as a fairly traditional 20th-century war, with two forces that are principally artillery armies and successor armies to the Soviet military, which was an artillery army. Much of the war is decided through the interaction of artillery, armor, anti-tank guided missiles, and a lot of modernized Soviet equipment. If you were around in the ’70s and ’80s, you would have recognized most of the things on the battlefield from 2022 through 2024. In fact, most of the equipment NATO sent was also made by NATO from the ’60s through the ’90s.

Then drones evolve quite rapidly and really start to mature over the course of this war. The question is: are we close to this final stage of maturity, or will we see a substantial reduction in how much manpower is involved? Would drones become much more autonomous, with a different set of technologies and artificial intelligence used for navigation, guidance, and so on? How relevant is that to the wars we plan to fight and the way we want to fight? Every military has its own conception of its contingencies, the scenarios it has in mind, and an idea of how it wants to fight.

Here’s the challenge: how do we know, when we’re looking at a war, what we see is generalizable to other wars? Every war has its own context and geography. This was principally a land war, with an air and a sea component. Second, when you’re looking at a prolonged conventional war, there’s always the question of what part of the war you want to draw lessons from. Most wars of this type start with an intense phase: the clash of forces and the reconciliation of military plans. But they often become positional and attritional. Forces dig in, there are many more troops on the battlefield, everything’s mined, and it’s very hard to break through. Drones really came into their own more in these latter phases. Sometimes people make the mistake of looking at the latter phase, the late parts of a war, and thinking, “Okay, this is how the next war will start.” But the opening phase of the next war is often different from the middle phase, when both sides enter the dynamic they’re trying to break out of.

For the United States, part of our challenge is that we’re tactically an incredibly skilled force. We spend a lot of money on our military, its training, and the quality of our personnel. Preston’s absolutely right: we spend a tremendous amount on the expeditionary air component of our force because it’s the best combination of mobility and firepower on the battlefield, which enables the rest of the force to conduct combined-arms maneuver.

By that I mean that if you think of the different combat arms—infantry, armor, artillery—and aviation in combination with them, those forces work together. All those pieces interact with and support each other dynamically on the battlefield.

One of the big advantages of our force is not just technology or personnel training, but the fact that we can run a complex operation with all these pieces working together, at least ideally, and achieve a much greater effect because they’re interacting and are much better coordinated.

Lastly, one of the biggest separators among modern militaries is whether you can do what you practice in an exercise or a small scenario against a permissive environment. Let’s say you’re fighting the Taliban. I’m not saying that wasn’t a challenge, but it’s quite different from facing the largest conventional war Europe has seen since World War II. The ability to scale complex operations is a big limiter for other militaries. The Russian military really struggled with this extensively at the beginning of this war.

To make an analogy for people outside military affairs, it’s one thing to run a business with 10 employees. It’s another thing to run a corporation with 10,000 or 20,000. The complexity scales. I don’t know anything about running corporations, but I imagine there’s a great deal more complexity than in something like a small business, even though in principle you’re still running a business operation. I use this analogy to explain how the United States is advantaged in some ways.

But there are open questions based on what we’ve seen in this war about whether we need to adapt and change the way we operate. There’s some uncertainty about whether our traditional advantages will offer the same benefits in a future war if that war features this technology on the battlefield. One thing we do know is that our opponents, like Russia, plan to fight this way. We already have a sense of how they plan to fight because we see how they’re fighting in this war. As Gibson used to say, “The future’s already here. It’s not evenly distributed.” We already see this on the battlefield in Europe.

3. Who is winning the war?

An absurdly large question, but who is winning this war right now? Maybe a better version of the question is: What’s a good measure for scoring the war in terms of the military balance of power and effectiveness? Territory gained, casualties, the quality of each army, maybe other measures? Who’s winning this war right now?

I’ll tackle it. Honestly, Lex, it’s a question I generally avoid. I understand where the question comes from. People want a very clear and concise answer about where things stand right now. But this isn’t like a football game, where both teams are looking at the scoreboard to see who has more points at the end of 60 minutes. You can say that whoever has more points at 55 minutes is that much closer to winning. Russia and Ukraine, in this case, are fighting for different things. They have different objectives.

You could oversimplify it and say that Russia is trying to take Ukraine and Ukraine is trying to maintain its sovereignty. But then you go down a rabbit hole of what success is. The fact that Ukraine still exists today, to a degree, is winning. But it has lost some territory that it doesn’t appear on the verge of getting back. That is not winning. So it’s difficult.

When you look at historical conflicts like World War II, Nazi Germany was winning for most of the war, until it wasn’t, and then it quickly lost. Imperial Japan was winning much of World War II in the Pacific. It was unstoppable if you took a snapshot in time. Then all of a sudden things turned, it was losing, and it lost. So in the middle of a conflict, I feel like you could paint winning or losing in whichever direction you prefer.

Is it fair to say that either side can collapse quickly, so the tides can turn dramatically?

Historically, we have seen that. I don’t know that there’s a lot of evidence for it right now. I think there was a lot of expectation early on that Ukraine would be the country to collapse. Countless analysts said, “They’re on the verge. This winter’s going to be it. This summer’s going to be it,” and they’re still holding. There are no indications that either one is on the verge of collapse, but some large change could dynamically shift the conflict.

With the Prigozhin-Wagner march on Moscow, there was a possibility there. Maybe that would have brought about not necessarily a Russian collapse, but an inability to continue projecting power into Ukraine.

A black swan event is probably a little too much, but it’s that type of thing that could precipitate a major change in the direction the war is going.

Yeah. I don’t see either side being able to impose the kind of collapse I think you’re talking about right now. Part of the reason is the way they’re fighting and the interaction between the two forces. It isn’t really conducive to producing that. It’s very hard to generate the level of momentum and exploit battlefield conditions to force a collapse.

Although, as I often say, we have to be mindful that wars unfold in phases. There are periods when one side has the initiative. Russia held the initiative for a long period of time. Now, in 2026, we see that Ukraine increasingly has the initiative on parts of the front and is imposing real challenges on the Russian armed forces. You could say Ukraine has been advantaged on the battlefield this year for a time.

The debate we have as analysts is whether that’s going to be a lasting advantage, a secular trend, or a window of opportunity for Ukraine. Just because you’re advantaged, as Russia might have been in 2024 and 2025, doesn’t mean that will hold or last. You see the way one side fights reach diminishing returns and become cost-ineffective. That’s what happened to Russia in 2025. Much of it is an interaction between the two forces: adaptation, new technology coming along, and both sides experimenting with different ways to fight.

I think neither of us sees this as a cop-out. As analysts, there’s always a tendency to admire the problem. But if you say somebody’s winning, it often sets expectations for people and certainly for any audience. Most people think that if you say someone’s winning, that side is going to win. In the conventional world, it’s very hard to see even a couple of months ahead because so much is contingent. You can only say that Ukraine is advantaged on the ground right now.

But Ukraine also faces a very significant challenge from the Russian strike campaign. None of us is sure how this winter is going to go or how cold it’s going to be. That’s a big factor, too, and other factors are at play. What other wars will happen? The U.S. war with Iran had a material and political impact on this war. We don’t know what else will take place around the world that may shape this war, because there are all sorts of countries that are de facto material parties to the war or very significantly engaged in supporting the countries fighting it. There are a great many factors to consider.

When you analyze the war, maybe you can speak to the levels of analysis that are most important to you and that we should be thinking about. I’ve spoken to historians like James Holland, who analyzes World War II, the Western Front, and the Eastern Front. He focused on the Western Front from all the different levels: tactical, strategic, operational. There’s also the political and geopolitical level, the supply chain, all of that, down to geography and weather, like you mentioned with winter. What are some of the levels of analysis that are important in this particular war?

For a military analyst, there are at least three levels, and then there’s the central political level, which is also central to understand. The first is the tactical level of analysis. That’s the nitty-gritty battlefield detail: what’s happening on the ground in specific fights, and how the two sides are fighting at the tactical level. How are forces employed? We’ve covered quite a bit of that already. How does infantry advance? How are drones being employed? What’s the correlation of forces, and what are the day-to-day battlefield changes?

Those things inform your understanding of how the war is being fought and help set your expectations for what’s likely to happen in the months ahead. They’re also relevant because, even though the war won’t be decided by who advances the next 5 or 10 kilometers, the tactical-level war very much informs the strategic level. It sets expectations among military and political leaders about who has greater bargaining power, who has leverage, and who is succeeding on the battlefield. It also provides information for negotiations between the two sides.

To some extent, we can’t fixate too much on the map, but the map is important. You can see who is adapting and who isn’t, and who is increasingly suffering greater casualties and battlefield reversals. In this case, in 2026, that’s Russia.

Let’s take the operational level. First, I’ll say this is a thorny subject in military circles because I know plenty of people on the military side who don’t think there’s a discrete operational level of war. They think there’s operational art, but there isn’t such a thing as a separate operational level of war. We should not get into that discussion here.

Oh, so you’re saying that some people listening to this who are very angry hearing you even say “operational” like it’s this discrete layer?

I would not say they were angry, but I can imagine a host of army majors getting ready to debate this as I bring the topic up.

Okay. Okay.

Let’s just stop it and say, look, there are different ways of looking at the operational level of war, but there is such a thing as operations and the conduct of operations, right? Which is important. And this is much more the organization of intelligence, logistics, fire support, and the coordination of different units in a coherent action with a clear objective, right? Ideally, the operations then link what you’re trying to achieve in terms of the objectives of the operations with the political goals of the actual war, right?

Ideally, military strategy takes the operations and connects them to the political goals of the war. So you’re not just conducting successful military operations, but they have a clear purpose in terms of the political objectives you’re trying to achieve. Operations are things that are phased and planned. They involve coordinating a whole host of units, but they have a clear objective behind them. They have a sequencing.

They’ve thought through how they’re going to set the conditions, how the breaching force is going on, who’s the second echelon. If you meet with success, who’s going to exploit that success? If you don’t meet with success, what are the different alternative courses of action you’re going to take? And then ultimately, how are you going to consolidate, right? So it has a lot of moving pieces. This is what staffs usually plan, and often they’re looking at bigger formations.

If we were talking earlier about infantrymen, squads, platoons, companies, this is more at the size of armies or corps. And then above that, we have military strategy. At its core, it’s a theory of success, right? There’s some coherence to the logic of what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. There are choices being made. It reveals itself often best, actually, in what you’re choosing not to do rather than what you’re choosing to do. That’s often the most interesting part for me as an analyst.

There’s some sequencing involved. You’ve thought through the sequencing of actions. Ideally, it links the actual operations you’re doing and planning with the political goals of the war that you receive from your political leaders, right? Preston, you want to add a bit more to that? Military strategy to me is always one of the more interesting topics, at least intellectually. It’s often debated: What is the military strategy, and to what extent do you understand it? But this level is important too.

So I always wonder, at every layer but the strategy layer, how much does strategy look like—I apologize—but Pinky and the Brain? There’s that cartoon where, you know, “What are we going to do today?” “We’re going to take over the world.” You kind of assume everything goes flawlessly, and it’s this dramatic picture of success. How much planning is there for all the different contingencies, including complete failure? How many of the different trajectories are considered?

Strategy, in theory, first, is a plan that you’re not going to change quickly or often, because otherwise it’s not much of a strategy. But any good strategy must have core planning assumptions, and if those assumptions are proven wrong, you should expect to adjust. A lot of times, strategy goes poorly when people are trying to execute a strategy even though their assumptions are clearly wrong. I can think of some wars we’ve been in that looked a bit like that.

Second, the strategy is iterative, so it’s interacting with the strategy of your opponent, right? Ideally, you’re iterating, looking at what your opponent’s strategy is, how your strategy is performing against what they’re trying to do, and then changing it over time, right? But unlike tactics, which change quickly and have to keep pace with technology—and tactics inform strategy—if strategy is divorced from tactics, then it’s a great staff planning exercise. It may be very well written, but the force can’t execute that strategy, right?

Alternatively, if you just have tactics, you’re just fighting battles, then you don’t have a campaign, okay? You may have good ways of fighting a war, but you haven’t thought through how you’re going to win it. You don’t have a campaign thought through. It’s not obvious how the battles you’re fighting are going to aggregate to military success.

4. Military analysis of Russia's 2022 invasion

Maybe we could take, given everything you laid out now, the invasion of 2022, February 24th, as a case study. What were the failures and what were the effective decisions on the Russian side and the Ukrainian side in the early days, in the early months of the war? Maybe, Mike, you could also talk about what you predicted, what turned out to be a correct prediction, and what turned out not to be a correct prediction.

Yeah, absolutely. First, I think amongst the community of military analysts and folks who were looking at the situation in 2021, I was definitely one of the people who thought Russia was preparing a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine. Even though we weren’t certain, and I wasn’t certain exactly how they would do it or what it would look like, there were definitely gaps in information. It’s rare to have perfect knowledge of the adversary’s plans.

The U.S. intelligence community had great knowledge of Russia’s plans and was releasing that information throughout the Russian military buildup. It was a very difficult time because, first, many folks did not want to believe that what they were seeing on the ground—the Russian military buildup and the rhetoric leading up to it—was truly a buildup to a full-scale invasion. In fact, I learned as an analyst that even if all the pieces kind of look right, people naturally want to believe it’s anything other than that. This is a very inconvenient truth.

A host of countries and allies the United States had, like Germany and others in Europe, had a different interpretation of the evidence. To be frank, Ukrainian political leadership also had real misgivings about the likelihood of a full-scale invasion. People thought that if there was going to be a breakout of conflict again, it would just be narrowly focused on the Donbas region, and that much of the Russian buildup was meant to coerce Ukraine. It was meant to be part of coercive diplomacy or to distract Ukrainian forces.

There were competing interpretations. I want to be clear about this. People had different contingencies in mind. Some thought it might be just another Russian attempt to seize the Donbas. Some thought it might be something larger, trying to capture parts of eastern Ukraine. And some did think it was going to be a Russian attempt to take most of the country. I think I was amongst the folks that predicted the invasion early on, Russian intentions, and the scope of the operation, but not the way they were going to do it.

There, I think we over-rationalized the way the Russian military would actually conduct the operation, not seeing how the military strategy and the plan, the concept of operations, would be tied to Russian political assumptions. The Russian political assumptions were that Russian intelligence had set the conditions in Ukraine for a speedy takeover. The Russian troops would be greeted as liberators, okay? They could conduct essentially a coup de main, rapidly advance into Ukraine, encircle the capital, and either capture or isolate Ukrainian political leadership. Even though there would be an initial phase of combat operations, it would be brief, and they could get Ukrainian forces, to a large extent, to surrender or isolate them.

These are the Russian assumptions. I’m being clear about that. Then they could quickly move to a stabilization and occupation phase. All that stemmed from the fact that, at the end of the day, Vladimir Putin did not see Ukraine as a real independent country with a separate national identity, and really had not learned or updated his views at all from the real beginning of the war, which was 2014, right?

We know this because he actually wrote many of those views in a July article in 2021. If we go back to that, for folks who are interested, it was published. He laid out a whole series of views of how he saw Ukraine, how he saw the sort of ongoing frozen conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and his assumptions were fairly clear. I don’t think we did a good enough job of tying those assumptions to thinking through how Russia might actually do this kind of operation.

Second, the toughest thing to predict was the interaction between the two forces. Here, it’s not a case of overestimating the Russian military and just underestimating the Ukrainian military, although I think there’s a fair argument to be made that we overestimated how the Russian military would perform in this case. We underestimated how the Ukrainian military would perform in the initial opening of the war, in part because we knew far less about the Ukrainian military. I’m going to be very frank about that.

Most expertise is usually against adversary forces. We don’t have nearly as much expertise amongst allies and partners. That’s just the nature of the field and the profession we work in. Secondarily, I think actually more was known about Russian plans to attack than Ukrainian plans to defend. There’s a degree of anchoring bias that information has when you do analysis. But also, much was contingent. Ukrainian forces performed much better, and Ukrainian volunteers showed up to fight in those early moments. It was a very chaotic early period of the war, the initial clash and interaction of the Russian invasion and the Ukrainian defense.

I think one challenge analysts have, and one challenge for people who look at analysis, is understanding that military power cannot be abstracted by itself. I often see it abstracted in conversations: the United States is number one, China is number two, and Russia is maybe number three, four, or five, wherever you want to put it. But there’s no such thing. Military power requires a context to express itself, right?

If you’re thinking of a potential battle between the United States and China over Taiwan, you have one scenario in mind. If you’re thinking of a war between China and India, you have a different scenario in mind. This abstraction isn’t helpful. The scenario really matters because geography and political objectives matter. They drive the military strategy and concept of operations, which then heavily determine how the forces will be employed. That’s the most important thing here.

Sometimes you may know something about a military, or even quite a bit about both militaries, but knowing about militaries isn’t the same as knowing how the two will interact in a particular fight. That’s subject to a lot of individual choices, political and military choices, and also a great deal of serendipity and chance—things that are contingent.

I’ll say this about the opening of the war: as poorly thought through as the Russian invasion was, and as unworkable as its assumptions were, in many cases the Ukrainian defense itself was improvised. In my view, that first clash was contingent on a whole series of choices and early battles that went a certain way. We’ll continue to debate this military history for a long time. People interested in military history still debate what happened in World War II, World War I, and the Napoleonic Wars.

I bring this up to encourage a degree of humility. This war is hardly over. We still have a long way to go to piece together exactly what happened and why. We often don’t have a great understanding of the probability of a timeline, because people naturally assume that whatever timeline they’re living in—whatever happened—was the likeliest series of events to take place. They rarely assume they’re living in a fortunate version of that timeline.

I’ll stop there in this discussion of what we thought, and the initial interaction of the Russian plan to invade and the Ukrainian plan to defend. I learned a great deal professionally as an analyst watching it. I’ll be honest: I learned particularly from the things that weren’t necessarily right, but from the things they got wrong. I think you learn far more professionally from what you get wrong.

What surprised you the most?

What surprised me the most, first, was how the Russians conceived of this operation. They had a fairly leveraged and fairly brittle force, without any real plan B. There was no hedge in their invasion plan.

Second, they performed very poorly at the tactical level, in terms of capability and the quality of the force. It’s difficult to judge how a military going through reforms and modernization might perform in a large-scale conventional war if you haven’t seen it fight one. But I think there was an intervening period when we overrated them. That’s a tendency when looking at adversaries, because we tend to worst-case them.

I’ll be very honest: it’s often a professional assumption that it’s better to worst-case an adversary—to assume they can do the things they want to do and talk about doing—and get that wrong, in which case your own forces have a good day. That’s better than the opposite: strategic surprise, like Pearl Harbor, where you underestimate your opponent and the result is disastrous.

Yeah, and I guess a bunch of things went wrong when you look at the reality of war. There were the columns of tanks going toward Kyiv that weren’t effective. When you take a military force and it connects with the reality of the geography and the situation, you get to see which tactical decisions were effective. That was the illustration of that.

Ultimately, you have the interaction between the two forces and the decisions both sides make. I think the initial prediction that Russia would succeed in this conventional phase of the war came from the fact that it looked like they had superiority in deployed forces. The Ukrainian military was fairly late to mobilize, and many Ukrainian military assumptions seemed to be that the focus of the Russian invasion would be in the Donbas. That’s where a lot of units were deployed.

Many units weren’t available to defend in the south, to check the Russian advance from Crimea, or to defend in the north. In fact, there were almost no regular military units north of Kyiv to stop the advance from Belarus. It was difficult to assess how those plans would interact.

I look back on it and think I learned a tremendous amount, and so did other analysts. It’s a case we’ll continue to study. But this was just the very initial period of the war. What’s interesting is that I think military analysts got much better at correcting expectations. Predictions for follow-on offensives and counteroffensives became much more accurate once we saw the two forces in the fight.

Preston, what surprised you most about the beginning of the war, looking back now, especially as the war has evolved?

There was something right out of the gate, Lex, that I think is still there today. It shows the difference between what we’ll call the Soviet military mindset and the Western mindset, and we hadn’t really seen this in play before.

In my experience, fighting the Global War on Terror, we weren’t going up against a conventional force operating in any way similar to how we were. We push authority down and allow junior leaders to make decisions in the moment. The whole idea is that you have a commander’s intent: what we’re trying to accomplish and why, the task and purpose, and all of that. Down the chain of command, soldiers have the authority to make a decision on the spot: “I need to go left,” or “I need to dig in,” or “I need to call for reinforcements,” or “I need to retrograde.” That authority is pushed down to the lowest possible level, so we have 18- and 19-year-old kids making incredible decisions in combat.

For a little context, you served in Afghanistan. Maybe you can connect some of the experiences you remember from that with what you’ve seen in terms of examples of how a Western force operates.

That was very dispersed. We were spread across a lot of small bases in Afghanistan, so you had captains and below—sometimes 24- or 25-year-olds—making daily life-and-death decisions for a lot of people. We would push that down to 20-year-old staff sergeants or sergeants making decisions that could cost the lives of their men.

So you’re saying that a 19- or 20-year-old, if they have a good idea and a good decision, has the authority to act on it?

Yeah, there’s a lot of leadership involved in that, because you can’t just grab a random guy and say, “We’re going to let you make whatever decision you want.” Through the training and the briefings from the top down—from brigade to battalion to company-level commanders to the squad leader—you make sure your people know what you’re doing, what the mission is, and what you’re trying to accomplish, so they have a full understanding.

Then, when something inevitably goes sideways, they’re not stuck like the Russian army was when trying to advance on Kyiv. When they got stuck, they stopped. A shocking number of senior Russian officers were killed in the opening few weeks of the war because they kept having to go closer and closer to the front to essentially move traffic jams. The Russian army didn’t have that authority pushed down the ranks, whereas we did.

Again, this was a Ukrainian victory, to be clear. The U.S. and NATO had been doing some work training Ukraine for some time. In some units, that instilled the idea of junior leadership and empowering junior soldiers. Even if they don’t have an order, they still know the mission and can make the best decision on the spot. We didn’t see that from Russia, and I’d argue we’re still seeing that today.

On the Ukrainian side, there’s a crazy amount of innovation. I know we’ve talked about it with drones, but even the tactics for how they’re going to advance in certain areas are different from one unit to the next. A lot of that is driven from the bottom up, which is a very Western military thing. On the Russian side, it’s still top-down. They’re given their orders and their place on a map: go there. That was surprising to see right out of the gate, and I think it’s pretty notable.

As the war hopefully wraps up before too long, I think a big takeaway will be that this method—pushing authority as far down the chain of command as possible—is preferred.

Yeah, absolutely. That’s both a conversation about leadership and military culture. In looking at the Russian military before this war, the gaps in our knowledge about how they would fight were filled by what we knew about doctrine and operational concepts. More should have been done to fill the gaps by looking at military culture, including the real deficits and shortcomings in the culture and the leadership style preferred in the Russian armed forces.

When looking at the Ukrainian military, one could easily say we could have done a much better job learning more about the Ukrainian armed forces before the war to better estimate how they would fight. But in many cases, talking to Ukrainian colleagues, you find that a lot of these battles and interactions were the result of initiative by units and commanders in those early days. It was quite chaotic. Volunteers, troops, and people who essentially mobilized themselves to fight and join the forces filled the ranks early on and swelled them in order to muster that defense.

5. Battle of Bakhmut

You’ve written about Prigozhin’s mutiny in ’23. What does that teach us about the structure of the Russian military? I’m going to Perplexity here: the Prigozhin mutiny was a short-lived armed rebellion led by Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin in Russia on June 23 and 24, 2023.

Prigozhin was a well-known character to people who followed Russia well before this war, particularly because of Wagner’s role in other wars, like the Syrian Civil War, and its deployments to Africa and parts of the Middle East. But Prigozhin rose to prominence among Western audiences because of his outspokenness, his public criticism, and the conflict he developed with the Minister of Defense at the time, Sergei Shoigu, and the Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov.

To quickly track how I remember Wagner’s role in this war: Wagner came in early in 2022. They were paired with the Russian airborne forces. They showed some success in May 2022 at Popasna. Their role in the war then expanded, and Prigozhin was given authority by the Russian government to recruit from Russian prisons. He started hiring convicts to build special convict-staffed assault formations and groups within Wagner.

Wagner’s assault force grew, and the group was thrown into the fight for Bakhmut. It entered a grinding battle for the city. The battle technically may have started around August 2022, and it ran through the fall and winter, all the way until May.

We should say that’s one of the most important battles in the war.

It is one of the most important battles, particularly in the early period of the war.

Can you take a small tangent and tell us what your memories of that battle are? Can you describe what it was and what it taught you about war, and about this particular war?

The fight around Bakhmut was, in some respects, a classical siege. There was both a battle for the city and a decisive battle around it to control the roads and ground lines of communication into the city.

The Ukrainian defense of Bakhmut increasingly looked precarious in February and March 2023, but that wasn’t because of the urban battle for the city. The city was divided by a small river. There was a residential eastern side and a more urban and industrial side. I want to be clear: this is a nice city. I have a friend who was in the Peace Corps there. He knows it much better than I ever did.

Bakhmut is a medium-sized city, but not a well-known one in Ukraine. It had industrial zones and nine-story apartment buildings. Those of us who were born or grew up in the Soviet Union can remember them well. There was a residential area on the east side of the river, and the terrain was higher than the city. The city itself was in a kind of punch bowl, on lower terrain. It wasn’t easy to defend because the terrain was higher both to the east and west.

Russian forces occupied the positions east of the city, and then two battles took place. One was for Bakhmut, as Russian forces steadily entered from the east and made progress westward. The other was a siege around the city. To take a city, you have to interdict your enemy’s ability to reinforce it and control the logistics. Otherwise, they’ll keep reinforcing it, and the fight will be a long slog.

Ukrainian forces were essentially fighting two battles. In some ways, the more important one was the battle to prevent the city’s encirclement. I happened to be there with Ukrainian forces when the Russian military had gone around the northern side of the city and was very close to interdicting one of the main roads running down from Chasiv Yar. This was the road that crumbled. Part of the reason was that another town north of Bakhmut, Soledar, had fallen. The flank, essentially the left flank, began to give in this battle. Then the right flank slowly began to give as well, as Russian forces entered the eastern and then southeastern parts of the city.

Like many cities that face a battle like this, Bakhmut saw systematic destruction. This was still very much an artillery, infantry, and tank fight. Infantry fighting vehicles, BMP-2s, fired 30-millimeter cannons directly into the city. Tanks came into the city and fired directly down streets at buildings and enemy positions. There was close-quarters combat between infantry, fighting from building to building. You could picture this as a fairly traditional urban fight.

On top of that, there were drones and light bomber drones. At that time, in the winter of 2023, FPVs were just being experimented with. You didn’t really see them at that point in the fight. It was a grinding battle. Wagner threw constant assault groups at the Ukrainian defense, exhausting it with convict infantry. Many of them were killed, but Ukrainian units got tired and ran out of ammunition. Then Wagner sent more experienced troops.

The Russian airborne forces essentially secured the flanks and provided artillery support. It wasn’t just Wagner fighting, although Prigozhin liked to take all the credit. In reality, Wagner had a large amount of artillery support because the Russian military had a significant fires advantage in this fight. That artillery was leveling much of the city. Russian airborne forces also secured the flanks so Wagner could focus on the fight for the city itself.

It was a grinding, traditional battle that ultimately saw the destruction of the city. By the time Russian forces took it, very little of the city was left. If you see images of it now, you’ll see that. From my point of view, it’s not only a tragedy; this is the fate many other cities have suffered in Ukraine. In some ways, Russian forces took nothing at the end of the battle because there was very little of the city left to take.

And you’ve referred to the Bakhmut syndrome.

Bakhmut became a fixing point in the war at a critical period. In the fall, Ukraine had two remarkably successful offensive operations. One was in Kharkiv, where the Russian military was literally routed. The other was in Kherson, which was slower and more plodding but nonetheless forced the Russian military to withdraw from the western side of the Dnipro River. Both were successful, and they began to set the expectation that this could be a shorter war, that Ukraine could achieve a military victory.

The Russian military then tried to use Bakhmut as a fixing fight, employing Wagner as the expendables in the battle. Prigozhin may not have seen himself and his forces that way, but certainly that’s how they were being used. It became a grinding fight, and over time it started to sap morale.

Battles like this take on political significance. I personally think the loss of Bakhmut wasn’t all that important or meaningful. In fact, I know that, because it took the Russian military a whole year to get from Bakhmut to Chasiv Yar, the next town over on higher terrain.

Still fighting for it.

It took them another year to take a large part of Chasiv Yar. If you look at the distance on the map from Bakhmut to where they are, it’s not far. I think the evidence is now incontrovertible: the loss of Bakhmut wasn’t nearly that critical at the end of the day.

Critical for the broader strategy of the war. Why over-fixate on Bakhmut?

The challenge is that battles become politically significant, even if tactically they might not be justifiably freighted with that significance.

When you say “politically,” do you mean something like Stalingrad in World War II? Certain leaders become fixated on a particular city as a symbol.

Yes. The battle for Bakhmut, to me, was freighted with political significance because it was a contest. Wars are fundamentally contests of wills and contests between the systems of states. These become bellwether events. Political leaders often see a battle as significant. Maybe the city itself isn’t critical, but they can’t afford to lose it.

Why? Bakhmut became very important for Ukraine because Ukraine was heavily dependent on external, Western support and wanted to maintain the perception, after its successful offensives in the fall, that the war was going its way and that it had the momentum. Ukraine believed that further support, the equipment it wanted to receive, and the additional capabilities and training it wanted would be tied to the perception in Western countries that Ukraine was winning.

They were very concerned. Wars are full of sunk-cost fallacies and this pathology of thinking. They were naturally concerned that the loss of Bakhmut would lead to a turn in Western public sentiment and the views of political decision-makers in Western countries.

There was this whole campaign organized called Fortress Bakhmut. I always worry when any city, especially a fairly small city, is declared a fortress, because then it means that forces there will not be able to withdraw or retrograde in a timely manner. I know from Ukrainian troops that most people who end up in those battles also worry when something is declared a fortress, because they know it’s going to be a pretty tough and bitter fight.

Essentially, what happened was that this became a prolonged attritional fight over Bakhmut. Ukraine was able to draw the fight out, but I’m not sure that was necessarily to their benefit. It tied down quite a few units in the fight for Bakhmut. There’s an ongoing debate about the extent to which the battle for Bakhmut expended very experienced troops in exchange for holding onto a town for some extra period of time. On the other side, the Russian military was fighting with these expendable Wagner forces. A lot of them were convicts.

There’s also the question of whether it pulled in forces that could have been used and trained—very experienced forces that could have been trained on Western equipment and could have led the summer offensive in June 2023. Instead, green, new, inexperienced troops with better Western equipment, but still lacking experience, had to conduct a very difficult breaching operation.

All these questions remain, and I know we’ll continue to debate them. But the bottom line was Bakhmut Syndrome: choosing to defend the city past the point when it made sense. That often happens because it’s very difficult to withdraw from a population center. Population centers often fix fights; that tends to be the character of this war. Defense is often anchored around population centers, around cities. They serve as a key part of the defense. Once the fight becomes a siege of a population center, it’s very hard to withdraw. You’ll see Russians expend an immense amount of troops and personnel to try to take it, destroying the city in the process. But Ukraine also bitterly held on to the city in an effort to exhaust the Russian offensive there.

Before we return to Prigozhin, Wagner, and Prigozhin’s mutiny, Preston, what do you think about this, maybe even in the modern context: over-fixation on particular symbolic regions, territories, or cities versus territorial gains in the broader context of the war?

It’s difficult, and I think it’s case by case. As Mike mentioned, sometimes a place gets this added value just because it’s held for a period of time, and it was hard to take for a month, then two months, then three months. All of a sudden, it’s this fortress city when maybe it shouldn’t be that. But both sides—that’s exactly what we saw with Bakhmut. Russia was very hyper-focused on taking the town, to the point where they had to. If they weren’t going to take it within a period of time, it was going to be a failure.

We started to see them claim ownership pretty early on. They were maybe exaggerating their advances, but it showed just how important that was to Moscow. It made the town equally important inside Ukraine. Beforehand, I don’t think anybody would’ve expected that. Now, as Mike mentioned, looking back, there’s some debate around it. But I think it’s the kind of thing that just happens to a country, happens to a military.

There was a lot of criticism of some Ukrainian military leaders at the time, and we’ve seen that in a couple of other areas as well: the Kursk offensive and Avdiivka. I believe there was some debate around that too. Right now, I think we’re going to start seeing more around Kostiantynivka. It’s an area that’s starting to look like some of these other areas that got encircled, and it’s a big ask of the military leadership to be able to recognize that.

Nobody wants to withdraw from that area, especially in Ukraine’s position. They would be giving up their country’s terrain to the advancing Russian army. But at some point, it’s no longer worth holding on, and you’re risking the troops that are forward. It’s a very difficult decision to make, and I think it’s more emotional than we can recognize from the outside.

Yeah. That point is a judgment call. When are you no longer exhausting your opponent with a very favorable attrition ratio in an urban fight, because you’re on the defense and they’re on the offense, and they’re likely to take more casualties? Or when are you facing potential encirclement? There’s a threat to your force. The lines of communication are being interdicted, so you’re losing personnel and equipment trying to sustain your positions.

Lastly, you can usually really see it when you’re forced to counterattack to maintain your positions, because now you’re taking casualties as the one going on the offensive in order to try to maintain the position. We’ve seen that time and time again in a number of fights. In some cases, it’s justifiable; in other cases, you can see it may be politically motivated.

At the end of the day, military strategy flows from decisions of political leaders. Political decision-making holds supremacy, and they decide what is a critical objective and which battle is essential in the war. Even if analysts, somebody else, or planners looking at it might say, “This is not a critical fight,” that doesn’t matter. When political leaders decide it’s a critical fight and raise the political stakes by saying they’re going to try to hold on to the city, then it becomes important.

6. War optimism and bad information

Can you speak to what it takes in the modern context to gain control of a territory, or to “take a territory”? There’s something I’ve heard both of you speak about, which is that the Russian military claims more territory than it has actually taken, and that the difference between how much territory is actually taken and how much is claimed to be taken has an effect on the actual operation of the military. Can you speak to what it takes to gain control of a territory?

I think that’s up for debate, and we see Russian analysts getting frustrated and debating this day in and day out, because it happens in phases. If you look at a town in Ukraine, there’s a period of time when it’s normal, there’s a population there, and the businesses are open. But as the front gets closer, you start to see the population leave and the businesses close. The next thing you know, it’s just the military. Then at some point, there’s no military because it’s in the gray zone, and you’ve got Russians on one side, Ukrainians on the other.

What Russia has done a lot of lately—I feel like it’s increased—is have one soldier go forward and wave a flag for a drone to pick up. They’ll mark that on a map and then say, “Everything from there back, we now control.”

So, like a video of that soldier with that flag in that area?

Usually a video. This last week, we saw some AI being utilized where it was a—

Like a fake video?

Yeah. It was a fake video called out by the Russians themselves, saying, “Guys, what are we doing here? This is not good.”

Wow.

But even if it is a real soldier, that’s the PR victory of saying, “Look how far we’ve advanced. We now control this territory.” The Russian pushback there is that one soldier in a basement is not control of territory. Is it a platoon of soldiers? Is it a regiment pushing forward beyond that town? That’s up for debate, because even if you have a large number of troops in that village, if you can’t resupply them, or if Ukraine has drone dominance in that entire area and you can’t get anyone in or out, what are we talking about in terms of control of the village? You don’t really have it.

It’s tricky in that sense. I think if you’re talking about full-blown control, as in you can move in and out of that town as you see fit, you’re probably talking about 20-plus kilometers back from the front line. Even then, you’re still at risk of getting hit every single day by drones.

These forward areas have been interesting. A concern I have is that we’re starting to see Putin more and more reference some of these claims that are not in line with reality. I really wonder where up that chain of command they understand they’re sending a false report. The AI video is a great example. Somebody made that. So where up the chain does somebody know this is not an accurate report and we’re not there, and send it anyway? Or is it going all the way up, and everybody genuinely believes that to be true? Because it paints a very different picture of how the war is playing out.

I think on the Russian maps, they consistently claim to be something like 10 or 15 kilometers forward of where they actually are. They regularly cite positions where they might have had soldiers in place—somewhere they infiltrated—but they don’t have them anymore. They’ve been lost. Or, as Preston says, they took pictures of some flags.

It actually shapes Russian operations very negatively. In some ways, we are fortunate that they have such a culture of falsification of battlefield data, because they then organize fire support around lines and positions they don’t actually hold. Their troops will often advance, or units that rotate into an area will be given the wrong information. They think their forward line of troops is actually in contested territory, right? So they’ll end up having their own soldiers killed because the map they were given is not correct.

I think Preston is also right that this information clearly trickles up to political decision-making and to Putin. That may be part of the reason why Putin holds the view that Russian forces are still advancing in the Donbas. The maps being supplied lie in a very literal sense.

Believe it or not, there is also a pattern to Russian offensive operations. We often see them intensify their efforts from October to November, and their casualties go up. It is often because they find themselves pressed to take territory they have been claiming to control in reports for months.

Now they are at a point where senior commanders are basically saying, “Now show it to me.” They do not actually control this terrain, so they have to throw men at it to try to realize the lie they have been telling for some time.

I completely agree with what Preston said. We have a very hard time mapping it. It is a gray zone for some substantial distance. To me, the best way to describe control is that you are able to use terrain for your purposes. That means not only that you deny it to your enemy and have a presence there, but that you are able to largely use the terrain, and the enemy does not have substantial fire control over it.

At this stage of the war, yes, you can go 10 or 15 kilometers from the front line. Those are technically your positions, but you cannot move freely around them. You cannot do much of what a ground force would expect to do. You have a presence, but you do not really have control. You are not able to use it for your own purposes.

In many places, Ukrainian and Russian positions in cities, or sometimes in tree lines, are so commingled that they are marbled. It is very hard to map control at all. If there are hundreds of Russian troops in basements in Kostiantynivka commingled with hundreds of Ukrainian troops in basements, who controls Kostiantynivka? How would you know that? How would you empirically judge it?

It’s crazy when you really think about it, Lex. I could color a map on the screen, and nothing matters. It does not really change anything. The fact that leaders are making those changes and then sending their troops forward with bad information is crazy. It is costing lives.

At the very least, when Russia claimed ownership of Kupiansk a little over a year ago, Putin said they had control over it. He famously invited international journalists and said, “Go in and check it out for yourselves,” but they did not.

What that did was allow Russian forces to relocate assets to other areas. Air power and fire support that might be needed in certain areas was either pushed forward or pulled back because it was no longer needed there. You have these soldiers out there who supposedly are 10 kilometers forward. They cannot get airstrikes on Ukrainian positions because, if they call that up, somebody is going to have to say, “Yeah, okay, the lines have changed a little bit.”

They are genuinely making these changes and making these false reports. It is hard to fully understand, hard to grasp. It is costing lives.

If you want an anecdote, I was just west of Kupiansk at that time last year, when Gerasimov declared to Putin in a meeting that they had all the Ukrainian units in Kupiansk encircled. I was there with a colleague from one of the Ukrainian brigades, basically reading this news, and it is remarkable. When you are actually right by there and see the situation, these things do not pass the giggle test. Nonetheless, this is what you see Russian senior military leadership tell their political leadership.

To me, this is fascinating. Maybe you can educate me on this, but my guess would be that throughout human history, throughout all the wars, whether you look at Napoleon, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, maybe even Genghis Khan, there has always been some distortion of information as it travels up the chain of command. There is some distortion depending on the culture. Is it a soldier lying to their commander? Is it the general lying to the commander-in-chief? There is some distortion happening somewhere.

Can you speak to the distortions happening on both sides here?

From what I can see, Ukraine is getting a much better picture of the current status along the front. It is very hard to say where, on both sides, there is a breakdown, and you are absolutely right. Commanders want to say they are doing a good job. It takes a lot of integrity to say, “We lost positions.”

We have seen that in the Ukrainian military, where commanders have been relieved because they did not report that correctly. It seems to be much more of a culture issue in the Russian military, top to bottom. But, yeah, it is definitely happening on both sides. It is definitely happening to a degree. It is hard to tell where that line is.

I think it is worse on the Russian side because of the military culture. First, there is a real lack of trust in the Russian military between soldiers and their commanders, and that breeds a lack of cohesion. Second, the military runs on a very coercive culture, so you expect that for any mistake, you are going to be punished. There is a strong incentive to lie.

Lastly, there is a centralization of command and control. Rather than the junior officer who is actually at the position commanding the troops having greater authority, it is the senior officer who has greater authority. They decide everything, then give the scheme of maneuver and the orders for junior folks to execute.

For the Russian military, the effects are worse because the way they plan military decision-making can often lead to what, in data, is called a garbage-in, garbage-out problem. If the information on what is happening at the tactical level is not correct, if it is false, and the planning is based on that, then people are executing combat tasks based on things that are not true. That is very problematic for that military, especially because they do not have the same culture of having the freedom to adjust, adapt, and make decisions at a more junior level on the ground. They are waiting for information to reach the senior commander.

I do not want to make it sound ridiculously regimented, but nonetheless, it is a bigger problem for the Russian military, as we see consistently.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces have also had issues with falsification of information, and commanders and planning commanders have been relieved, especially under the previous commander-in-chief, Syrskyi. Sometimes it was also because they were placed in an untenable position: they did not have enough men, and they had to defend the position. They were told they could not withdraw from a position without approval from the general staff. If they lost the position and reported it, they would be told they had to take it back, but they did not have the forces to do so.

A commander is sometimes faced with an ethical dilemma. Do I sacrifice men to take a position that I know is untenable or that I cannot take back? Or do I face the consequences of failing to report it, but preserve my own men? What do I do? These are not the easiest choices. It is not clean-cut.

From my observational history, it seems that, especially at the general level, there is a kind of optimism that there is a path towards winning this war at a strategic level soon. The United States and other nations have been engaged in what, in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq, are something like forever wars.

At which level of distortion of information do you keep going with this kind of momentum, with a war going on for a prolonged period without any strategic victory? Or is that not attributable to distortion of information and something else?

Oh, I think Afghanistan is a very interesting case study of how we ended up in that war for 20 years. Preston, I think you should talk a bit about that, since you were in that fight.

There is a pride aspect to it: “Can you get it done?” “Yes, I can.” It is not necessarily overstating what you are able to do, but understanding that there are constraints on your resources and what you have available to accomplish the mission. Nobody wants to be the one to say, “I can’t do that.”

There is pride in finding a way to make it work, and I think a lot of that comes down to bad advice at some level about setting those conditions. You should not be put in that position if you cannot accomplish the task.

Afghanistan is a great example. We had combat units spread across the entirety of the country. That was great for security, but not necessarily great for nation-building, or for developing and changing a culture, if that was even possible in Afghanistan. How do you get the people out in Zhari District in Kandahar Province to understand that the person in Kabul, who does not speak their language and whom they have never seen before, represents them? That is not a soldier’s job. We do not know how to do that. We are not very good at it.

But we do not want to say we cannot, so we say, “We’ve got it. We can figure it out. We’ll learn counterinsurgency operations. We will send people to language courses,” when in reality, somewhere along the line, somebody should have said, “You know what? This isn’t what we can do.” We need the State Department, USAID, and others to be able to step in and fill this. I think it is a military mindset, and I do not think that is unique to the United States.

I imagine most countries, the higher you get up the ranks, the more the generals are like, “We got this.”

I want to add to Preston’s great perspective the point of view from the other side, having had a bit of experience dealing with political leadership. Sometimes the information that the military passes up is overly optimistic. It’s this mindset of, “I don’t want to say it can’t get done.” But there are also definitely times when the political leadership has clear assumptions and is very resistant to information that runs counter to them.

One of the basic inputs into wars, when leaders think they’re going to go to war, is war optimism. They have a clear set of assumptions. Often it’s that the war will be sharp and short, that it’ll be a quick war. Good examples are Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 or our war with Iran this year. They’re resistant to information that it’s actually quite risky, or to considering what will happen if it becomes a prolonged war.

When military leaders tell them that it might be this or it might be that, and that they need all these forces, they face the problem that if they basically tell them, “This can’t be done,” the political leader will say, “No, you’re just the wrong person for the job. I’ll find somebody who will tell me they can do it. You think you need 300,000 troops for Iraq? I’ll find someone who will do it for a lot less.” Okay?

And lastly, there are often cases where, let’s say, you have a prolonged conventional war like Afghanistan, and the political leadership might ask not what you need to win the war. It’s not clear that victory, defined in their terms, is necessarily possible. They’ll ask, “Really, what is the number of troops you need for me to kick this can down the road so that we don’t lose the war on my watch, and then it goes to the next election and maybe becomes somebody else’s problem?” Okay?

So there are many times when I’ve seen that it’s not the military leadership that’s to blame. It’s the political leadership, which at the end of the day makes key decisions about the war and sets constraints on how the military can fight and what forces are available. They have certain assumptions and ideas, and they’re not necessarily amenable to military advice. They’re listening to the military advice, but they’re also considering domestic and international politics. Other things predominate in their calculus besides strict operational planning or military analysis.

I think that’s important to consider because wars, at the end of the day, are started by political leaders. They’re the ones who decide to go to war, and they have very strong views and assumptions, and to some extent, emotions and fears that play into that.

How often is it that military leadership, like the generals, try to say, “Don’t do this”? In terms of starting wars, this gets to a bigger theme. I would love to see a long-distance future of human civilization that doesn’t have wars. It seems like we start wars—humanity, broadly. I would love to know which humans among us can stop them from starting.

I think there are plenty of times when military leaders give advice that a war could be a risky or costly misadventure. They don’t necessarily say, “Don’t do this,” but the advice they give and lay out has clear implications. And there are plenty of times when military leaders—or, let’s say, civilian leaders—in our case, the Department of Defense, will advise against a war.

Yes, there are plenty of times when they don’t give that advice. I’d be open to Preston’s views on this, but if there’s some public perception of the military profession as people who are eager to go to war, that’s often not the case, and it’s not been my experience. People who have commanded others in combat, who have lost lives, and who understand the implications of that endeavor are very rarely eager to pursue it, especially if they’re not sure the cause is right, that it’s been well thought through, that the strategy makes sense, or that this is a necessary war. So that’s not been my impression.

One of the challenges there, Lex, is that it’s not the military’s job, at least the way we operate in the United States, to decide whether to go to war. It’s their job to advise on what the capabilities are and what the options are for the president, the commander in chief, to eventually make that decision.

So I think we have to be careful about that bleeding into the military’s role. War is a political endeavor. When the military starts advising on whether we should or shouldn’t go to war, I think that’s a very slippery slope. They can say, “This will or will not accomplish our objectives. If we drop a couple of bombs, it might not get us to the point where we can say that we got what we wanted out of this.” But broadly speaking, whether to go to war is probably not a decision best reserved for the military.

Absolutely. War is a sociopolitical phenomenon, and it is political leadership that has to make these decisions, holds the supremacy in making them, and is accountable for them.

In our system, specifically in the United States, the senior-most military officer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, does not command forces. They are the top advisor on military affairs to the president. That’s quite different from other systems, where you might have a commander in chief or someone else who can directly command forces. For example, in the case of Ukraine or Russia, you have a chief of the general staff or a commander in chief who holds a military position and can directly command forces.

7. Prigozhin's mutiny

Speaking of structure and the hierarchy of the different organizations in the military, getting back to Prigozhin—

Yes. Yes. Love this. I forgot about him.

We talked about this 17 hours ago. What happened there? You talked about the Wagner Group and Bakhmut. What was with the mutiny? What does it represent? What does it show about the Russian military?

Okay, so Prigozhin had this ongoing conflict with Gerasimov and Shoigu. Why? He was basically positioning Wagner as a more successful alternative. And I think he was allowed to position Wagner in this way, and I think there were elites in Russia who were backing him as well. So, to some extent, you had an internal battle between different elite clans: one associated with the Ministry of Defense and the military, and another backing Prigozhin.

Prigozhin was given this leeway. He would constantly complain that he wasn’t being given enough artillery ammunition, and so on. Even though his effort was a priority, he was given a lot of artillery ammunition to sustain it. He was also building a popular following and, to some extent, trying to see if he could expand his political cachet.

Ultimately, that competition between him and the military played out at the leadership level, and he actively attacked the Ministry of Defense and the chief of the general staff. Wagner forces also looked down on the regular Russian military, seeing them as incompetent and ineffective, while the regular Russian military looked down on Wagner forces, seeing them as either hired mercenaries or convicts. So there were clashes between them.

They competed with each other during the Battle of Bakhmut. Even in the fight for Soledar and later in the Battle of Bakhmut, Wagner and the Airborne competed over who would take credit. Later in the battles, in April and May, Prigozhin started saying the regular military had pulled artillery and fire support from him because they didn’t want Wagner to win. They wanted Wagner to lose more personnel, then come in at the end and take the credit. He basically advanced this conspiracy theory.

But the mutiny really kicked off because, at a certain point, the Russian Ministry of Defense had had enough. Shoigu was clearly a much more powerful player, and he issued an ultimatum that after the Battle of Bakhmut was decided, all Wagner personnel had to sign contracts with the military.

For a long time, Wagner was essentially an autonomous force supported by the Russian military and generally integrated into an operational command, with all its logistics supported by the regular Russian armed forces. But it had a huge amount of autonomy, with Prigozhin essentially running his own army and his own fight in coordination with the Russian Airborne.

Shoigu’s ultimatum trapped Prigozhin and put him in this position. Wagner had withdrawn from Bakhmut and was replenishing personnel in Luhansk. Prigozhin sensed that he was trapped: either Shoigu was going to force the complete surrender of Wagner’s autonomy, and he would lose command and control of his personnel, or he had to go on this reckless adventure.

I think he may have conceived of this not as an attempt at regime change. Some analysts I know saw the mutiny as essentially a petition. He then tried to advance on Rostov in Russia, where the headquarters of the Russian military effort for the war is. Wagner, if you remember the footage, actually encircled and occupied the headquarters. There was a standoff.

I mean, from the outside, it does look like an attempt to take over power.

Well, absolutely. It is a mutiny in the midst of a war, and he wants Shoigu and Gerasimov. He’s essentially stuck, though, because they are not in the Rostov headquarters. Putin comes out very vocally, seeing this and declaring it a betrayal in the midst of a war.

A whole set of Wagner columns—there are 2 Wagner columns—advance past Rostov down the road toward Moscow.

At the same time, they’re shooting down Russian helicopters and planes. Wagner’s mutiny is quite damaging for the Russian Air Force. It kills quite a few personnel, and they’re advancing toward Moscow.

There’s some degree of panic because the elites in Moscow aren’t sure what to do. All the Russian forces are deployed in and around Ukraine, and they’re not prepared to face these Wagner troops, who are fairly experienced. I want to be clear: they have tanks, air defense, and armored fighting vehicles. They brought a lot of equipment with them to the fight. I want to be clear: they’re not advancing in trucks and pickups. This is a mechanized formation.

So how close did that come to overthrowing power in Moscow?

I don’t think very close. I don’t think they had any chance of doing it, and Moscow’s a massive city, so if they’d gotten in there, I don’t know what they could have hoped to achieve.

Was there some degree to which that was the goal?

Look, I think once they got to Rostov and had no chance of getting their hands on Shoigu and Gerasimov, and Putin had essentially ruled against them, their only leverage was to advance on Moscow. Prigozhin used that advance to negotiate a stand-down and amnesty, and then a handover of assets and control of Wagner operations over time. That’s what happened. He used it as bargaining leverage.

I think he also saw early on that he didn’t have support from the Russian elite. The Russian elite didn’t see him as an alternative to Putin, so there was no chance of success in regime change. The reason for that is straightforward: in personalist authoritarian regimes, the first thing they do is eliminate alternatives.

Most coups you never even hear of; they fail. They never take off the ground. This was a rare case of a real mutiny that became a phenomenal 24-hour event. Most attempts at coups in personalist authoritarian regimes are stopped by intelligence before they take off the ground. Typically, the number of elites and people you have to involve in organizing a coup makes it very difficult to keep secret. If that authoritarian system is at all effective, it’s going to discover it.

That’s what I think ultimately happened. And lastly, I remember having these discussions at the time. Folks thought Prigozhin somehow got off easy because he negotiated a handover or sell-off of his assets and was still alive after the coup. But it was clear to those of us who followed Russia that there was no way he was going to survive this.

Speaking of which, according to Perplexity, Yevgeny Prigozhin died on August 23, 2023, aged 62, when his private jet crashed in Russia’s Tver region while flying from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Do you think he was killed?

It exploded in midair. It was very obvious that he was killed, and he wasn’t killed alone. He was killed along with several senior Wagner commanders. To me, the only explanation is that this plane exploded in midair, on video. It was clear that he was never going to survive this mutiny, and that top folks involved in Wagner very likely weren’t going to survive it either. He was killed very demonstratively, as a demonstration to others. That outcome was not surprising to me or to many other folks who had watched Russia for years.

This is a fascinating chapter in the war, Lex. There was a period of 48 to 72 hours where it was unknown what was going to happen. There was real consideration that this might be the end of the war.

A funny aspect here is that Prigozhin ran one of his many companies, the Internet Research Agency, which was kind of the bot farms in Russia. Prigozhin and Wagner were so popular at the time. But as Mike was talking about, one issue was that they were the ones being celebrated. Around the time of Bakhmut, the biggest, most significant battle of the war to date, likely, they were the ones being celebrated.

Yeah, nobody can tell you the other Russian units that were operating anywhere else. But people know Wagner. They know that name. They’ve probably seen pictures of Prigozhin. He was becoming famous.

So when this march happened, you had these bots. They didn’t know which direction to go. Are they still on Team Wagner because Prigozhin’s their guy and he’s capturing all these cities? Or wait a minute, is he against Putin now? Should we sit this one out?

Mm-hmm.

Another interesting aspect is that, in my opinion, this was something Russia was doing very well. It almost worked out too well, and they didn’t know how to direct it the right way. Wagner was kind of a private military company, a private military group. They weren’t really part of the Russian government, and this gave them this weird autonomy to operate in places like Syria. Wagner forces went head-to-head with U.S. forces in Syria.

It went very badly for them.

Did not go well for Russia.

I think it was 2018. It might have been February 2018, outside of Deir ez-Zor.

Yeah. It gave Russia the ability to have deniability: “These are a private company. This isn’t our military.” But they effectively operated. They would fly in on Ministry of Defense aircraft. They would train at Ministry of Defense locations. All things considered, it was a pretty effective mechanism of state power that Russia had put together.

They were pretty innovative in the war. The concept of pulling in these convicts—I just interviewed a soldier who fought in Bakhmut and talked to him a couple of weeks ago. He talked about how exhausting it was that these guys just kept coming, one after another. He said you couldn’t stop them. They were innovative in that sense, but Wagner wasn’t just prisoners. They had very lethal, well-trained assault groups that were leading the way in some of these new tactics.

In a sense, it was a privatized army. Prigozhin was competing to try to make them better. I don’t know what different directions that could have gone, whether they might have branched out or become a kind of elite assault force, but they became too popular. Shoigu and Gerasimov didn’t really know what to do. It seems like there was a bit of a panic, and they just shut it all down. Now it doesn’t exist.

There’s the Africa Corps operating in Africa. It has some of the old Wagner leadership, but they effectively did away with all that private military stuff and said, “We’ve got to bring this all in-house. We can’t do that again.”

But the interesting piece is that I do think Wagner was onto something. They were operating brutally. To be clear, it was an incredibly brutal organization. There was an awful video of one of their guys—I believe he surrendered, or wouldn’t go on an assault or something—and they got ahold of him. They smashed his head with a hammer against a cinder block. He was their own guy. So that’s the group we’re talking about, to be clear. But they were effective, and Russia destroyed the organization.

Wagner did have an effect, referred to as the Wagnerization of the Russian military. That’s what happens after Wagner is dismantled. The Russian military widely adopts Wagner tactics. It begins to contract convicts in very large numbers. It creates assault companies called Shtorm-Z and Shtorm-V. It begins to deploy assault companies of convicts, structured as assault groups, across battalions and regular formations.

It basically takes much of what made Wagner successful and begins to spread it across the Russian military. Having seen how Wagner fought, the Russian military begins to fight primarily with assault groups and assault detachments, using them as a constantly replenishable assault force that they throw at Ukrainian forces.

For a period of time, believe it or not, in 2023 and 2024, many of these assault units were staffed with convicts. Many others were not, but people took special contracts that paid more, essentially taking on the risk of being in an assault group. The Russian Ministry of Defense and the military actually began to copy and imitate a lot of Wagner tactics. The Russian airborne also built out assault groups and assault detachments.

Following this for years, you see the Russian military actually fighting primarily with these assault formations. Over time, there are fewer and fewer convict-staffed groups, but nonetheless, thousands upon thousands of convicts were used by the Russian armed forces in assault units after Wagner.

Prigozhin said he lost 20,000 people killed in action in just the Battle of Bakhmut, which lasted, I think, from August 2022 to May 2023. But the Russian military lost far more over the course of the years in terms of convicts they used.

I just want to add this postscript: Wagner as an organization may have died, but in some ways it infected the Russian military, and these tactics spread across the Russian armed forces. That led to some success, but it also led the Russian military to overspecialize in using assault groups, which eventually led to diminishing returns. They specialized in small-scale combat action and, over time, struggled to recover the ability to conduct larger-scale, more complex operations by focusing on fighting this way.

8. Putin vs Zelenskyy

I should mention to the listeners, to the audience, that it’s now past midnight, which is the only time we could do this. There are two people in front of me. They’re real warriors, powering through. I really appreciate it. Let’s take a quick bathroom break. All right, we’re back, trying to power through. This might be a good moment to ask about the very top, the leadership: the two commanders in chief, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, from a military perspective, in their roles as commanders in chief of their respective militaries?

In my opinion, it appears that Zelenskyy has offloaded a lot of the military responsibilities to the military, and he’s not making tactical- or operational-level decisions. Generally speaking, that’s a good thing. I don’t think that’s happening in Russia. It’s harder to say based on how Putin reports at times. It seems like he might be a little more involved than Zelenskyy, but I get the impression that he’s pretty removed from the military decision-making process, which is generally what you want to see. Historically, the more directly involved a leader gets in that type of thing, the messier it becomes in either direction.

In terms of the negatives, they both have very different dynamics at play. Zelenskyy is constantly appealing to an international audience, trying to solicit support from around the world. That’s not really something Putin has to do. Putin is much more focused on the domestic audience, and on presenting a strong picture to the world that Russia isn’t on the verge of collapse or falling back anytime soon.

Is Putin the same? Does he have any direct input into the military operation at the strategic, operational, or tactical level, as you understand it?

At the strategic level, I’m sure. From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t look like he has much input at the tactical or operational level, but I’d be interested in Mike’s thoughts there as well.

I think there was a period early in 2022, when things were going very badly for the Russian military, that Putin was actually contacting commanders. They were still very senior commanders, at the level of a grouping of troops, which is the operational-level formation above a combined arms army. But neither leader, in my view, really micromanages the fight.

I think Zelenskyy is getting a much fairer and more honest picture of the situation. He has a much better assessment of Ukraine’s position and how Ukraine can best align its resources, and he can best advocate for resources with allies. More importantly, he has more realistic goals for the military.

If you look at Putin, his political goals seem difficult to achieve. For a long time, I’ve argued that Russia has a fundamental mismatch in this war between its political goals and the military means available. The fault lies squarely with Vladimir Putin because he started the war. It’s the job of political leadership to see that mismatch, and certainly, if you can’t see it four or five years in, you should be asking yourself hard questions.

Can you speak to that mismatch?

You can periodize this war a number of ways, and I’ve done so in my own writing. You can look at different operations and offensives, or you can periodize it in one big way: the first 30 days were essentially an attempted coup d’état that failed. Russia attempted to take over Ukraine and replace its government with one imposed by Russia. This was really the contest over whether Ukraine would remain an independent state with its own national identity. The invasion failed decisively, and that attempt cannot be recreated in the context of this war.

Everything that followed—from February 24 to March 25—has been a difficult, tragic, prolonged conventional war defined by attrition and exhaustion. This war will potentially define the borders of the independent Ukrainian state, what its economy will be, to what extent the state will be economically sustainable, and whether Ukraine will ultimately have to make concessions in its strategic orientation or in what organizations it can join, such as NATO or the European Union. But it’s not a war to decide whether Ukraine will be independent or have its own national identity. That was already clear in the first 30 days.

To me, the war is in part Russia’s attempt to impose its will on Ukraine. But it’s been eminently clear for some time that Russia doesn’t have the military means to achieve Putin’s more maximalist objectives in this conflict. Even if you don’t agree with that assessment for the early years of the war, in the past year it’s become eminently clear that Russia isn’t coming closer to its goals. In fact, its military performance is getting worse, and that’s been going on for some time. I’d say the inflection point in this war for Russia, certainly on the tactical level, was in the summer and fall of 2025.

Ukraine has actually narrowed its position in negotiations fairly closely to its combat performance. Its political demands are a ceasefire along the line of control and the repatriation of lost people and stolen children. These aren’t the outsized demands that Russian political leadership is making. Russian demands aren’t tied to Russian military performance; they seem much more tied to the performance Russia wishes it had in this war but doesn’t. That’s why Russia wants Ukraine to concede the rest of Donbas: it isn’t able to take it and isn’t on a path to taking it anytime soon.

Even if we assess this war against Russia’s most minimalist territorial war aims, prioritizing the occupation of the rest of Donbas—the last remaining 20-plus percent—we have no way to predict whether Russia will be able to take it in this war, given how poorly the Russian military is performing right now. Here I’m making a judgment: if you see a country prosecuting a war with a clear mismatch between its available military means and its political goals, and its leader is unwilling to revise those goals downward and willing to pay a cost that would be ruinous for Russia, this war will be seen as a strategic failure for Russia with generational knock-on effects. Whatever Russia takes won’t be worth the cost. That’s very clear at this point.

It’s very difficult to see how Vladimir Putin goes down in history from this war other than in ignominy. Even this many years into it, you can now clearly see that Russia isn’t attaining its military objectives on any reasonable timeline. It isn’t revising its negotiating position, and there hasn’t been a dramatic shift in how its forces are fighting the war either.

Can you linger on what Vladimir Putin’s maximalist objectives might be? Which territory is included in those objectives? Donbas?

Absolutely: Donbas, as much of Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipropetrovsk as Russia could potentially occupy. You don’t see Russian forces advancing only in Donbas. You see them advancing on a broad, 1,200-kilometer front. Donbas may be the priority effort, but Russian troops are conducting ongoing offensive operations elsewhere. For a long time, they were taking territory wherever they could, and last year they were actually advancing more in Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk because it was easier to advance there. There was less urban terrain and fewer of the Ukrainian army’s better troops there, since the rest were focused on defending Donbas.

Russia is also seeking national concessions: limits on the size of Ukraine’s armed forces and the capabilities Ukraine can have; limits on Ukraine’s strategic orientation or ability to join NATO; and limits on whether Western forces can ever be deployed or based in Ukraine. Other concessions concern the status of the Russian language and perhaps the Russian Orthodox Church. Those demands are still part of Russian negotiations, along with seeking recognition for the territory Russia occupied and annexed.

The reason I say all this is that I think it’s a fair criticism. I don’t know how Preston sees this matter, but I think Ukrainian goals in this war are not only far more reasonable, they’re well constructed and tied to what the military can achieve. There’s an observable strategy that integrates military operations: stabilizing the front line and liberating territory; protecting critical infrastructure with air and missile defense to reduce the impact of Russia’s strike campaign and prevent the Russian leadership from thinking it can bomb Ukraine into conceding these demands; and exhausting the Russian effort by striking key components of the Russian economy, including energy exports, refining capacity, and other targets. More recently, there have been data centers, but essentially these are things relevant to the functioning of the Russian economy or the Russian government’s ability to raise revenue.

Is it fair to say that wars come to an end when both sides’ demands match their military performance?

To put it simply, it’s when both sides see that negotiations and a negotiated settlement are a better alternative to fighting than what they can hope to gain on the battlefield.

I think that’s a good way of putting it: when military capabilities match what the political concessions look like. I think that’s exactly why a lot of folks aren’t very optimistic about an end to this war anytime soon, because, as Mike mentioned, Russia’s demands are largely unchanged from the beginning of the war. Just this past week, Putin talked about how Zelenskyy didn’t have the authority to talk about the future of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk. He said those are historic Russian lands. So it’s not even up to Zelenskyy to talk about territorial concessions.

That’s where Russia’s mindset is—or Putin’s specifically. The territory they haven’t taken yet isn’t even up for discussion. It’s a foregone conclusion that they will own it. As Mike mentioned, they are so far from taking that territory right now. Part of that would require crossing the Dnieper River. No one in the world looks at this right now and thinks Russia is anywhere near crossing a water feature to take Kherson City and the rest of that oblast, let alone the small portions of terrain in Luhansk and Donetsk.

Given that mismatch between demands and military performance, other factors come into play, like the state of the economy, the will to fight among the people, and simply manpower, as you’ve spoken about. To fight a war, you need humans doing the fighting. How does that come into play? How long can Ukraine last in this fight? How long can Russia last?

Admittedly, I thought the sanctions would have done a lot more damage. At this point, I think a lot of people did, but they just haven’t. Russia has found a lot of ways to bypass them. I thought the Russian people would have been frustrated long ago with the change in their standard of living. That didn’t materialize. There’s no doubt that the Russian economy is feeling some pressure. To the extent that will impact the end of the war or could drive it, it’s a bit of a black box from my perspective.

The other issue Russia is dealing with right now is manpower. Overall, Russia has the manpower advantage, and it’s not close. They have more people than Ukraine, and it’s not close. Ukraine has done a good job of minimizing the number of soldiers at the front in dangerous positions while mobilizing and conscripting people into the force. They’re handing a lot of this off to robots when possible. Russia continues to push men forward to take terrain, not with robots or drones, but with soldiers, and that’s costing a lot of lives.

Russia has started to really struggle to fill its recruitment demands in certain regions. We’re seeing what—In fact, I think Mike wrote a piece about this recently—but there’s a kind of shadow mobilization inside Russia, where they’re starting to coerce more and more people into joining the military. Again, they have far more people, but what does it look like when you start having to pull in more people who don’t want to fight?

Ukraine has already had to deal with that. They’ve already had to go through a number of different groups within society that maybe didn’t volunteer right out of the gate. I just read an article earlier today about a soldier who’s now doing an incredible job in the Ukrainian military. They grabbed him at the border while he was trying to leave the country, and now he’s found a purpose as a drone mechanic. Ukraine has done a lot of that. Russia is starting to get into it, and it’s a big unknown how the country will react when they start having to tap into other portions of the population.

I’m not overly optimistic, because we’ve seen a number of things at this point that I thought would have pushed the Russian population over the edge. The casualties, for one, are shocking. At about the three-month mark, I thought that would be enough for people in Moscow to rise up and say, “We’re not going to do this.” And here we are, with 30-plus thousand casualties a month, and there’s no end in sight. I’m not optimistic that a mobilization or a push to bring in more people who haven’t been fighting will change anything drastically inside Russia, but that dynamic is changing.

From a resource perspective, both of these are fairly large countries, and both of them have considerable external support. Ukraine has demonstrated immense resolve and will to fight, but clearly, without Western support—Western capital and Western military capabilities—it would not have been able to sustain the war this long.

Russia, too, has benefited significantly from China: the Chinese economy and access to machine tools and components from China. To a lesser extent, it has benefited from North Korea, and to a much lesser extent, Iran. But North Korea ships so much. At one point in the war, North Korea was providing 40% of Russian artillery ammunition. It was shipping artillery, and North Korean troops actually fought on the Russian side in Kursk, if you remember that battle. Both sides benefit considerably from external support, and that’s what enables Russia to continue the war.

From an economic point of view, it’s difficult to predict. It’s clear Russia has the resources to continue fighting into 2027, but key economic elites in Russia began publicly stating early this year, in the spring, that this war and this level of government spending aren’t sustainable. Russia is spending 44% of the government budget on the war, and maybe somewhere around 9% to 10% of GDP. The Russian economy has structural issues, and so much money is going toward the military effort and the production of military goods, which aren’t economically valuable, that the economy is slowly consuming itself. So they have issues.

For Ukraine, the main challenge is that the war continues to damage its economy and drive people from the country, since a big part of the Russian military campaign is to hurt Ukraine’s economic viability and the sustainability of life in Ukrainian cities. Even though Ukraine is doing well on the battlefield, continuing the war naturally comes at a cost. I don’t know any country that hosts a conventional war on its territory and is better off for it. That’s very clear.

Ukraine’s main challenge is that it depends so heavily on financial support, military support, and intelligence support from the West, and these are things that have to be constantly renewed. Increasingly, you also see that Ukraine is subject, to some extent, to the mercurial or capricious nature of policy in some countries like the United States. We should speak frankly about it, right? There’s genuine concern in Ukraine, I think, that folks here want to do business with Russia, and they want to do it no matter the implications for the allies, for Ukraine, or for this critical conflict that’s going to shape future security in Europe.

9. Trump

How long can Ukraine last without U.S. support? We should mention that there’s no direct financial aid from the United States, as I understand, but there is, as you mentioned, intelligence support and actual ammunition and weapons.

The reality is that the United States still provides considerable military equipment, ammunition, and other things Ukraine needs. Europeans are just paying for it. The United States is also offering quite a bit through foreign military sales. Europeans are paying for that. There’s a fair amount of intelligence support that I can’t speak to, but you should consider it probably still important to the effort.

Ukraine may not be nearly as dependent on the United States as it was earlier in the war, when we were providing a lot of the funding, artillery ammunition, equipment, and what have you. But in key areas, it does still depend on the United States. We’re dependent on the United States, certainly, not to try to hamper Ukraine’s military effort, where the U.S. still has considerable power and influence.

If you can evaluate, what has Trump done as our commander-in-chief in the context of helping bring this war to a resolution?

To be blunt, I don’t know that there’s been a lot that’s been good so far, in my opinion. I think we’ve ceded our position in the world. The world was looking to us, and I think still will in a lot of ways. Should we take that mantle back up, I think the world is looking to us to take the lead, to take point. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re shipping the most equipment or spending the most money, but it does mean leading the process and shaping what this will look like going forward.

I think we stepped away from that early in the administration. I get the impression that maybe the president thought this would be easier to resolve than it has been, and maybe lost some focus. We’ve also lost leverage over Ukraine, which is kind of a cold thing to say, but when we were providing weapons to Ukraine, we had more power and leverage to navigate the peace process. We did away with that. That hurt Ukraine, but it also gave us less ability to dictate the direction things should go.

We haven’t seen the sanctions layered on Russia that I think could have been. Unfortunately, I think there’s been some doubt thrown on the structure of the NATO alliance. Will the alliance hold? I think there’s probably just enough there for Putin to irrationally but possibly still think it would be worthwhile to poke and prod to see if there’s an opening.

Personally, I don’t think there’s been a lot of good. I think we’ve kicked the can down the road. We’ve opened the door for Europe to take the lead here. In some ways, they’ve started to. There’s still a lot to be done, but I’m not overly optimistic. I think we’ve made some mistakes in ways that are difficult not just for Ukraine, but for the United States.

The engagement with it has been pretty fitful, Lex. They seem to be coming back to it every 3 or 4 months. We’re heavily distracted by the Iran war. It almost seems that the Trump administration first settled on trying to coerce Ukraine, seeing Ukraine as the problem, then began to recognize that Russia was the problem, but did nothing to compel Russia to change its negotiating position.

The meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, seemed to begin bringing Russia out of the isolation that we and other Western countries had agreed on, and we can see the knock-on effects of that. More recently, we went back to trying to compel Ukraine once again. I just don’t think the way we’ve engaged in this process is the right approach.

I agree with Preston. The only positive thing I might say, because I think there needs to be a balanced view of this, is that even if it was probably for the wrong reasons, prioritizing an end to the war and pushing all the parties involved to make clear what their requirements are to end it—and creating some kind of process and alignment of positions on that topic—was helpful.

The previous administration had no plan. “As long as it takes” is a slogan, not a plan. If anyone knew what the Biden administration’s plan was to either win the war or end it, I don’t know. Our European allies had the opportunity for quite a few years to come up with some kind of plan or negotiating process, and they did not. Their consensus was to support Ukraine; that was the common denominator, and to sustain the war. But given that this is a war fought principally in Europe, they too did not take the lead on a peace plan for all those years, until the Trump administration showed up.

I’m using this as an opportunity for some constructive and hopefully polite criticism. Ideally, you should have an alignment of positions between the United States and European allies in managing European security. However, it’s not as though the Trump administration came into office and European allies had a plan or vision, and the Trump administration had a worse one or threw that plan and vision out. Then European allies were forced to play catch-up and maintain relevance.

All that being said, I think the Trump administration’s overall approach has not been a good one. They haven’t done a great job consulting the key allies involved in this. They’ve been capricious and, in many ways, unpredictable in their behavior both toward allies and toward Ukraine.

It’s clear that parts of the administration want to normalize relations and do business with Russia, and see the whole war as an impediment to that. Their motivations are, I think, objectively suspect to some extent. The way they’ve engaged with it has been, “Let’s make a deal,” without looking at whether the deal makes sense or whether it will be a lasting agreement. It could just be a piece of paper with the word “ceasefire” on it that, frankly, won’t be worth the paper it’s written on. There are real issues you can objectively take with the way the negotiations have been handled.

One thing I would add is that it’s important to look at all of this through the American lens. We’re Americans. It’s not just a matter of whether these decisions were good or bad for Ukraine, because at the end of the day, we should be thinking about whether they’re good or bad for the United States and our interests.

Ukraine has raised its hand a couple of times and said, “How can we help?” That’s especially true when it came to the war in Iran and some of these interceptors. There’s so much opportunity for collaboration, joint production, and standing up facilities. We don’t have to give money or equipment to Ukraine. There is a mutually beneficial relationship to be had, where we can help them produce, and maybe we get some rights for development, because we need a lot of that stuff too. I just feel like, again, we’ve left a lot on the table.

And we certainly haven’t used our leverage. We’ve been very resistant to using any of it to compel Russia. The approach has been unhelpful and hasn’t really used the power we have in the world.

I think part of the problem was how we started. When the Trump administration began this effort, for some reason they decided to immediately maneuver the United States out of the leading role in a coalition supporting Ukraine and trying to achieve a favorable outcome in this war. Instead, we became a neutral party that would referee and arbitrate the outcome and try to make a deal, pretending as though the previous history of how this war began and our whole role in it didn’t happen.

It was a very strange approach to take, because it gave up our influence and leverage over both our European allies, who didn’t trust our intentions and could see that we were basically no longer on the same team, and our partner in Ukraine, who immediately began to think we were about to sell them out. We turned around and abandoned our critical role in supporting them, taking one that now placed them on equal footing with Russia.

To be clear, Russia even today laughs at the idea that we’re trying to be this neutral party. They do not view us that way. They view us as firmly in Ukraine’s camp, understandably so. These moves to separate ourselves may have seemed, on paper, like, “Well, now we’re neutral, and we’re not directly aligned with one side or the other.” That didn’t go over in Russia. It didn’t carry.

10. Paths to peace in Ukraine

At this late hour, this is the most challenging question: What are the possible paths to peace in the war in Ukraine? Can you speak to the different trajectories? What are the things you hope to see?

I don’t see a willingness on the Russian side right now to negotiate. There are negotiations taking place, and there’s another push, another effort. Maybe some sort of partial, compartmentalized ceasefire will be achieved. For example, a ceasefire on energy strikes between the two sides, or a ceasefire halting strikes against shipping in the Black Sea, which have escalated this year. I think that’s possible.

The problem we have is that the Russian position remains that fighting is their preferred alternative to negotiation and to revising their current demands. From Putin’s perspective, he is likely to wait to see the outcome of 2 things: the strike campaign over the course of the winter, and whether that places Ukraine in a weaker bargaining position. Ukraine right now has considerable leverage. Ukraine has done much better this year at the front line than Russia, and Russia does not have great prospects for advancing along pretty much any part of the front.

Can you explain why that is, and why you’ve already mentioned a couple of times that winter is a very difficult time for Ukraine?

Winter is hardest not for troops at the front line; it’s hardest for the civilian population. But a country is not just the map or the front. It’s the economy, the cities, the people. That’s actually what you’re fighting for, right? And that’s who winter affects the most.

The second thing Putin may be waiting for is the outcome of certain elections in Europe in the spring, like France’s election, to see if the overall situation could be more favorable to Russia. Right now, I don’t see any serious effort other than Ukraine’s strikes to compel Russia or meaningfully exhaust it economically. So far, they have been impactful, but at the end of the day, it’s clear that Russia still has the resources and the will to continue the war into 2027, and so does Ukraine. Europeans, if they have to, are likely to come up with more funding for Ukraine next year. I think so.

We have not cut off military support—the things we are sending and providing that Ukraine depends on. We have made threats recently, unfortunately, to suspend it, but we haven’t really cut these things off. Even though negotiations continue, as they did last year, that’s why I have a bit of a pessimistic view. I could be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. Those of us who have been working on this for a long time would like to see it end in the right way, with an acceptable outcome, if not a favorable one for Ukraine. We would also like a deal to end it in a way that doesn’t just lead to a third continuation of the war.

This is the pessimistic prospect I want to raise. A lot of folks think, “Let’s just get to a deal. Let’s get to a ceasefire. Why won’t Ukraine, why won’t Russia just agree?” Because ceasefires can often just become rearmament periods to renew hostilities. Ukraine is very vulnerable some months after a ceasefire. Eventually, it’ll have to demobilize all the men at the front line who want to go back to their lives and families. Russia’s force is largely contracted. Russia may not demobilize its force. Ukraine could be very vulnerable six to eight months after a ceasefire is signed if there are no genuine security guarantees from the United States or anyone else. All they got was a piece of paper saying, “Ceasefire.” Russia had the opportunity to rearm, and the war is renewed—except this time, Russia is in a much more advantaged position given how things developed after the ceasefire.

For those not familiar with this war, it started in 2014, and there were 2 failed ceasefires that never led to a political settlement: the first Minsk agreement and the second Minsk agreement. Those of us who are familiar with this history both want to see a ceasefire and are wary that it may just be a piece of paper with those words on it, without leading to a lasting peace. My concern is that we will potentially see a third iteration of this war, where how this war ends takes us to the next one. There are plenty of conflicts like this: wars between India and Pakistan, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Armenia-Azerbaijan, where there are multiple wars in the series.

You’re implying there’s a low probability of success in the near term for the negotiation efforts. If it turns out that they are successful, what does that look like? What do you think? What is the glimmer of light, as we search for some optimism that they are successful?

They get at least a partial ceasefire in place, compartmentalizing this war, ideally beginning with strikes against critical infrastructure by both sides, and maybe also interdiction strikes in the Black Sea.

And then maybe we start to see an agreement on a ceasefire for some period of days, to show both sides’ commitment to engaging in this political process in earnest. You usually have to start somewhere, and a ceasefire lasting some period of days—a week, two weeks, a month—is that beginning. Right now, I don’t see Russia willing to agree to something like this. If they were, there’s nothing that would have stopped them. That proposal has been on the table for a long time now.

They’re not interested. Their position is that they don’t want to agree to a ceasefire. They wish to settle all these complex, difficult issues, and only then will they offer a ceasefire. But the thrust of that position is that they don’t see a ceasefire and negotiations right now as a better alternative to fighting, at the end of the day. That’s because Putin’s perception of the situation, from my point of view, is different from ours. I also think it differs to some extent from objective reality, or at least I suspect that’s one of the inputs into his calculus.

If we look at the longer-term future, what does Ukraine look like after Zelenskyy? What does Russia look like after Putin?

This war will leave lasting damage on Ukraine and on Russia. It’s fundamentally a tragic war. Even though I think we will ultimately judge Ukraine as having been successful in defending its independence, the cost will be great. I do imagine that better future because I think that, ultimately, this will pass. It’s far from the first destructive European war, and, unfortunately, in the history of Ukraine and Russia, it’s far from the first destructive war visited on these countries and the people who live in them.

In that regard, it’s doubly tragic. So many battles have been fought before in these same areas. It’s a tragic history to see that, in the 2020s, we still have a large-scale conventional war taking place here. One of the outstanding questions—and to me, this is an implied question in what you’re asking about the future—is whether Ukraine will be viable as a state and as a nation after this war. I think so. Obviously, it depends somewhat on how the war ends, but more importantly, on the kind of support Ukraine can hope to have from European countries.

If the rest of the nations in Europe, or at least the key ones, see Ukraine as European, essential to European security, and a member of that community, they will see to it. They will work with Ukraine to ensure that it’s successful. It will have to depend on them for some time. The question about Russia is a challenging one because Russia is not a problem of one person. Russia is a large country with a lot of people in it. People matter because they make decisions.

Vladimir Putin cares far more about Ukraine than other Russian elites. In fact, many of them, I think, are mystified by this war that he’s launched. But nonetheless, some percentage of the population supports it, acquiesces to it, and hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of Russian men sign contracts to fight in it. This is the first large-scale conventional war that Russia has fought where very few of the men were mobilized and many essentially took money and contracts to fight in it. So it’s not just Putin’s war.

The question we are, in some respects, dealing with is one of Russia’s failed imperial transition. The fact is that Russia has not become a post-imperial nation-state in Europe. I want to make a broader point here: to me, this is, in some respects, a war of—I hate to frame it this way, but I think it’s useful—Soviet succession. It’s a result of that history that goes back to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which historians I know argue was both an event—we remember it as happening, and the dates it happened—but also a process.

That process is really one of imperial collapse, not just of the Soviet Union, but of the Russian Empire that lay under it as a foundation. This is fundamentally an imperialistic war by a state, an elite, and a leader that couldn’t see another way of being or another vision for Russia. One of the challenges we have is this failed transition for Russia. It’s not just that Russia doesn’t become democratic; it’s that, whatever the political system may be, the state has not stopped being a revisionist, revanchist, imperial state in Europe.

But I don’t see this as deterministic or certain or forever. The truth is that Europe was filled with countries that were imperial powers that also did not surrender their empires very easily.

11. Nature of war

Sherman famously said, “War is hell.” I’d like to talk to you about the nature of war, having studied it for so long. What do those words mean to you?

It feels like a sickness we can’t kick. For all the ways we’ve gotten better as people, as humans throughout our evolution, the one thing we keep coming back to is killing each other over disputes. It’s pretty crazy that we’re still doing that when you really think about it.

There’s an aspect of war that’s fascinating to me because, along with the worst, it brings out the best, and we see some wonderful stories. We’re seeing that right now in Ukraine. But when I really step back and think about it, it’s depressing that this is still the way we resolve differences. It’s crazy that we get to a point of who can kill more people to come to a conclusion. So, unfortunately, there’s no end in sight, I would say, but it’s a human condition.

What gives you hope for the future of human civilization? We’ve been talking about some dark topics. You both have families. Do you ever sit back, look up at the sky, and say, “I think we’re gonna be all right. We’re gonna make it as a species”?

I’ll give you two real quick. My wife and I just watched the Stanford Prison Experiment on Netflix. You know what I’m talking about, the show that just came out? At the end of it, you’ve got all these people who had nothing in common, and they just spent a bunch of time together, kind of trapped. They all became friends, and they came out the other side. There were no political debates or anything like that. It was just cool to see so many different Americans in one spot come out the other side friendly, having a good time. That was great. That was a pick-me-up.

In the context of what we’ve been talking about today with war, and specifically in Ukraine, there’s a new innovation on the robotics front that rolled out this past week, where they saved a soldier with a drone flying 30 kilometers away. They put a soldier—there were two of them—underneath a drone. It’s a company called SkyFall, and they have essentially a casket underneath a drone. They flew this thing up to the front because they couldn’t get this soldier out. They couldn’t walk him out. They couldn’t get the UGV ground robots in there to get him.

It’s CODE 9.2. It’s the regiment I mentioned earlier. It’s them, and they’re one of the most innovative units.

They flew these in. In one of them, the guy’s buddies brought him out, packed him in, and they flew out. The other guy crawled into the container himself. Once they’re in that pod, they can talk back with the crew, so they’re not alone. They say, “Hey, we’re getting there. Just so you know, we’re taking off. Here we go. A few more minutes. You’re doing great. Can’t wait to see you.” They’re talking to him the whole way back.

In the video they shared, one of the guys was in the hospital being treated the day after, with his kid right there on his lap. I thought, “That is so cool.” So much money, technology, and effort went into it. It wasn’t just one drone that went out, you pushed a button, and it went. There were shaping operations, coordination, infantry, armor—everything went into the operation to get this one guy, 24-year-old, I think. Just go get him. Loved it.

Can I give you another anecdote, also from CODE 9.2, ironically the same unit? You asked what gives me hope. I spend a lot of time studying war and dealing with war, so you get to see some of the worst of humanity and also some of the best, often in the same spaces. If you travel the front line, you will see that. You will see basically the worst that humanity has to offer and the best, sometimes on the same day.

Another anecdote from CODE 9.2: there’s this fantastic video—a challenging one, but a great one—where they have two wounded soldiers. This was before the SkyFall system was available. Two soldiers are being evacuated by UGV, an uncrewed ground vehicle. They’re both in it, kind of like a small truck, and it gets hit by a Russian drone and is disabled. They’re stuck out there, both wounded, in this UGV.

The company commander sees them on video and, without waiting, races to them in a pickup truck. He pulls up, backs up to them, and gets out. He’s a really big guy, as you can see in the video, and he’s not wearing any body armor. He didn’t even bother to throw on his plate carrier. He grabs one guy, throws him in the pickup, grabs the second guy, throws him in the pickup, and speeds out of there. They all make it out.

Obviously, it’s incredibly dangerous. There are many moments like this that you can see in a war that give you hope. The last part may sound silly. It’s a grim enterprise. The thing that gets everyone through it is a dark sense of humor, which you need to have in this profession as well. People who have been fighting for a long time still haven’t lost their humanity.

At every level.

The humor, the wry smile. The ability to show love toward each other. It’s great. That’s such a complicated thing about war. It really does show some of the most beautiful aspects of human nature.

It does.

Sometimes we need tragedy to really bring out the best in us.

It’s a stark contrast when you see it, right? It’s in sharper relief than when you’re going about your normal day-to-day life.

Well, Preston, first of all, I want to say thank you. You gave me this gift.

Absolutely, man. How about that?

I’m going to have to drink this soon. All of us, like ships in the night, literally met at night and made this happen. It’s a huge honor to finally meet both of you. Thank you so much for everything you do in the world, and thank you so much for this conversation. This was awesome.

Thank you.

Thank you, Lex. It’s been great.

Yeah. Thanks for hosting this and for inviting us.