I can’t listen to this right now, but I’ll try to put up a cleaned up form for anyone who just wants to read. Youtube has an auto-generated transcript. That’s kinda mangled and can’t identify speakers, so I’m trying to do so from the text, and might make an error or two identifying speakers.
The host is Max Bergman, and other participants Maria Snegovaya, Michael Kimmage, and Michael Kofman.
Reading through it and putting up a summary/cleaned up transcript:
Kofman: The Ukrainian offensive culminated around October. The fighting has taken on a more attritional character. Russia had attempted its own offensive starting October 10th and has been attacking along the line in an attempt to seize the initiative. To some extent, Russia does have the initiative, but they do not at this point have any major breakthroughs or successes that they can point to. I think what we’re going to see is a period of traditional fighting this winter, not too-dissimilar to the period we saw last winter. Next year is going to be a challenging year. To some extent, Russia has the materiel advantage on its side if we look at ammunition availability, maybe a bit equipment, and to a much lesser extent manpower. That being said, these advantages are not decisive, so we shouldn’t consider the outcome to be determined by them.
Bergman: Russia has worked on increasing industrial output over the past year. I think at RUSI, our colleagues have determined that Russia had been producing roughly 40 long-range cruise missiles a month, and has gotten that up to over 100. Are you expecting Russia to try to do what it did last winter and bombard Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure? Have we seen that already this winter? Is that something that you’re concerned about in terms of air defense munitions?
Kofman: The two treadmills we’ve been on for the whole war have been artillery ammunition, which has been essential for Ukraine to sustain defensive efforts, and the other is air defense ammunition. Interceptors for air defense and missile defense. I think that we’ve already seen the beginning of a Russian strike campaign. It began in November, with a fairly large drone strike. I think that Russia is this time trying to test saturation of the air defense systems provided to Ukraine by the West, but is going to come after infrastructure again. Both Russian missile and drone production have been increasing. They are license-producing Iranian drone, the sort of various variations of Shahed and as those stocks increase, the West has been working to try to improve the air defense situation as well. In this regard, Ukraine is in a bit of a dilemma. Ukraine is a very large country, the second-largest in Europe after Russia, and it’s challenging to defend key cities, critical infrastructure, electricity, water management, power plants, right, the things that people need to make it through the winter, and also defend the front line. The line of contact is about a thousand kilometers long. I hope people appreciate that it’s a very lengthy front, and it’s very difficult to provide air defense along the front line as well. So far Ukraine has been able to manage the situation with Western assistance and has gotten through the past winter, but much of these things are contingent. You don’t know how cold the winter is going to be for example, and what kind of stocks the Russians have or what kind of reserves are available for Ukrainian air defense. I don’t see the picture necessarily as dire, but I do think that it’s a very important aspect of the fight to look at beyond just what’s happening at the front line.
Bergman: Maria, maybe you could talk a little bit about the state of the Russian economy and Russia’s defense industry? We put out a report earlier this year which said that sanctions were impacting Russia’s ability to ramp up defense production, but it looks like during an intervening period of time over this year they’ve been able to address that. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but Russia is adjusting very successfully to sanctions, and the overall export controls are not working to the extent that…for example, Russia is actually importing more of the sanctioned chips and related electronics than it did before the war started through third countries, as we know Central Asia, China, other countries that are assisting Russia in doing that.
Snegovaya (or perhaps Bergman): Unfortunately there are no good reliable estimates that are more objective, but Russia itself is reporting a very successful increase in defense production. According to Bloomberg’s reporting, the Kremlin projected through 2023 the production of combat vehicles, aircraft and ships to grow by more than 26% and unreadable recently has reported that it increased production of tanks seven times, light armed armored vehicles by 4.5 times and MLRS systems by 2.5 times. There’s also a drone situation where it seems like the inflection point was passed in the summer and right now Russia is surpassing Ukraine in production of drones, which was we know are highly important in this war.
Bergman: So – again these are the Kremlin estimates, that should be taken with a grain of salt – having said that, what we’ve seen unfortunately successes that Russia is preparing for a very successful perhaps offensive or at least doubling-down on the war and has resources to do that when compared with the situation in Ukraine and especially Western aid to Ukraine. Mike, let me turn back to you on that: are we seeing the battlefield effects of Russia having that materiel advantage and what are the prospects for us and European defense industrial efforts to ramp up? I mean, I think that’s occurring somewhat when it comes to 152mm ammunition but in general there’s, I think, a sense that we’re not matching Russia’s defense mobilization. How do you see the defense-industrial side of this?
Kofman: Sure. So, first, in terms of observed outcome on the battlefield, I think fortunately, the Russian military has consistently chosen to attack prematurely before the force quality is there and before they’re ready, on the basis of feeling like they have the numbers, equipment, and artillery ammunition to do it, and these offenses have been unsuccessful. They’ve shown that with advantages they have, they’re not sufficiently decisive either in firepower, in force employment, and in tactics. And the actual quality of the force, it takes time to restore quality of the force – an army is not just equipment and ammunition. On top of that, I think what one can observe is that while it’s true that Russia has substantially transitioned to a wartime economy and is now spending a significant amount of government revenue on defense, industrial output is actually using this as a primary vehicle to drive manufacturing and GPD growth. They still have significant issues with equipment. I think that the numbers that they put out are far too fanciful, and are counting way too much in those numbers. They are counting equipment that they serviced and repaired, equipment they’re pulling out of storage. The majority of the equipment they are still using they’re pulling out of warehouses. This is the Soviet legacy they inherited. They’re increasing production of equipment in key categories like missiles, for example, like drones and more-modern tanks like T-90M, but it’s slow. You can observe literally from satellite them building additional facilities along these complexes on assembly plants, meaning they may be making the investments, the industrial capacity is physically growing, they’re starting to expand it, but I don’t know if they will able to translate that into significant battlefield gains next year. That very much remains to be seen.
Kofman: Okay, regarding the question on defense and industrial mobilization, yes. So, the Russian decisions were clearly made starting last fall when they went through with partial mobilization of personnel, began to realize this is going to be a long war and started to actually convert the economy to this wartime footing, started making those choices that they were basically neglecting to make over the course of the first year. On the Western side, I think it’s really only now started to occur that this is indeed going to be a long war. If you look at the US, yes, we made investments in artillery ammunition production. It’s going a bit slower than I expected, but it’s a lot better than it was. We started the war making 14,000 main caliber artillery shells per month. We’re now making 28,000 and we’re going towards 36. That’s pretty good. I would say that for a year and a half’s worth of work, Europeans cannot tell the same story at all – I just want to be clear on that, and I’ve been publicly clear that I think North Korea has given Russia more artillery ammunition than Europe has given Ukraine. That’s just one category of munitions; I don’t want to discredit all the things Europe has done for Ukraine. They’ve done a lot – they’ve done a lot of other…in terms of material outcomes in a war that runs on artillery ammunition, air defense ammunition, drones, we’re just seriously getting about the business of looking at this as a long war that requires a long-term strategy, and next year will require those investments in industrial capacity both in Ukraine – which increasingly can make drones, can make these systems – but more-importantly in the West is we’re actually going to have to see and follow through, right, we cannot have a case where 13 months into the war Europeans pledge a million artillery shells and then they say that they can barely do half of that by the end of, you know, over two years into this war and then we’ll see what comes in the third year. Like, I think we’re going to have to do a lot better if we’re going to properly support Ukraine and see this conflict through.
Bergman: Michael, I want to turn to you, one of the questions I think right now that I have is what are Putin’s objectives in this war? I think that there was perhasp a hope by some that if – you know, Ukraine’s counteroffensive didn’t go as well as expected or failed, however you want to categorize it, but that this would sort of sober up the Ukrainians to say "Okay, well, we’re not going to be able to achieve our goals on the battlefield and that now’s the time for negotiations, but it doesn’t seem like there’s any interest coming from the Kremlin. How do you read? Is there a potential negotiation here if aid is potentially drying up from botht he United States and Europe?
Kimmage: It’s good to be agnostic about what we know, which is quite-little of an objective kind. I think that we could begin the analysis with public media displays in Russia over the course of the last couple of weeks where there have been a lot of victory laps that Putin has been taking. Of course, he’s running for president in March, so part of this is self-promotion, and Putin has lots of incentives to say that the war is going very well, but they’ve really been pouring it on thick in the Russian media that the West is crumbling, that Ukraine is on its last legs, and Russia is on the verge of achieve victory, so it would be very difficult to reconcile that narrative with any kind of compromise or negotiation coming form the Russian side. Additionally the 7th of October [the Hamas attack on Israel] and its many complicated, uh, aftereffects in the Middle East and globally…I think one has to say have rebounded to Russia’s advantage. Not on the ground in the Middle East and not on the ground in Ukraine, but the narratives that Russia is able to project now with greater confidence that I think are also hardening the Russian position, which was hard to begin with. And then, of course, the optics both in Europe and the United States of political division, which is to a degree quite real. Some of it may be fragmentary and momentary, but it’s hard to say that the EU and the US Congress are firmly behind any one position on the war. Those optics are also, I think, feeding into a mood of self-confidence, so as I interpret it, it’s sort of half-projected, half-theatrical, because I think that Russia has to know that it faces a huge number of real-life challenges in Ukraine and is very far from achieving its political objectives. On the other hand, I think Putin has multiple legs on which to stand, and the ones that Maria mentioned about political economy are also very significant, so I think that you have to infer from all of that that this is probably the worst time in the war for any kind of serious negotiations and Maria, there’s an election coming up in Russia, I’m curious what your take is on kind of the public mood inside of Russia when it comes to this war. Is there any sort of softening of support or is there a danger there for Putin when it comes to the public opinion?
Snegovaya: I wouldn’t frame it in terms of a danger. I think that Putin is feeling pretty comfortable when it comes to the public opinion, partly because the Kremlin was quite apt at adapting to this new reality by committing a lot of resources toward those families that are directly or indirectly participating in this war. This is the term that the economy of death in which many of the families of the Russian soldiers or those who died in this conflict receive a lot of pyments and sometimes these are quite significant enough to, for example, purchase an apartment in certain remote Russian regions. Plus, when it comes to the elites, despite the fact that many of them lost because of the sanctions the ability to, for example, travel to the West, enjoy the luxurious lifestyles, they are compensated domestically through redistribution of property which is very radical and relevant in Russia right now as many Western companies fled the country after the war began. These valuable resources are redistributed to these groups. In addition to that, as we have discussed with Michael, the military-industrial sector is getting a lot of money, and that creates their own stakeholders as a result. Last year alone the number of dollar millionaires in Russia, despite these unprecedented sanctions from hell, increased by more than 10 percentage points, and I’m afraid that this dynamic will continue in the sense that there are a lot of new stakeholders that the war has created. This is, by the way, not unique to this war. Wars usually create stakeholders and this is likely to continue, so that is one factor. Second, of course there is a degree of war fatigue combined with the fact that Russia really experienced unprecedented losses in this war. I think by certain estimates up to 300,000 people are incapacitated or dead on the Russian side. This to the best of our knowledge exceeds significantly the Afghanistan losses that actually contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union and yet we barely see any protest. Just recently, there was some development – the wives of the mobilized Russians started isolated protests, but those are quite marginal and the Kremlin is trying to take them under control. Again, when it comes to the war fatigue, we have seen lately in the polls that the number of Russians who are in favor of peace talks has somewhat increased but again, with a Russian spin to it, these are the people who want to keep everything that Russia gained in the war, so not any concessions, without any concessions to Ukraine, and again those groups do not constitute the majority. It’s perhaps up to 30% of the population. The majority seems to go with the flow. Lastly, Russia has very pronounced electoral cycles. So Mike Kimmage has mentioned that Putin has re-election in March 2024. In light of that, he’s recently announced new redistribution to families with multiple kids, etc, etc. That’s very typical, but that certainly will be probably be enough to sustain support, and last but not least, this election – Russian elections have a degree of fraud, so this election is not going to be an exception. They are adopting all of the lessons learned from the constitutional vote in 2020 in including the vote period for up to three days voting outside of electoral precincts and of course the Internet-based, the so-called electronic voting which makes any monitoring of this election impossible. Last, but not least, they also pretty much imprisoned or repressed most of the independent observers, so if there still was somebody left who wanted to monitor the election, there’s really no such people left in the country. So this dynamic really makes things very comfortable for Putin. I think that he has really nothing to be scared of.
Bergman: Mike, you wanted to jump in?
[One of the Michaels, I assume Kofman from the subject matter]: Yeah, I just wanted to jump in briefly and it’s on the manpower issue. So I think the one area where Russia’s principally-challenged is manpower. It seems that there are big error bars on this in terms of our knowledge of Russian losses and recruitment rates, but it’s definitely fair to say that there total casualties exceed 300,000 and of those you can assume that maybe two-thirds, or 70% are uncrecoverable casualties. They were already at reduced strength, and the challenge they principially face – I want to come in this because Maria made a great point, you know. These mothers protesting, it’s not a big issue yet. It’s a symptom of a problem, of a structural problem. Russia was able to alleviate the deficit of manpower with mobilization, and they can recruit enough men per month to compensate for their losses, but they don’t have men to rotate. The people they mobilize and so they’ve been staying at the front, and they’ve been at the front since last fall, right, and they’re going to have to figure out a way to deal with that problem, and probably they’re not going to address it until after the March election because of the political challenges involved. But they will have to substantially increase recruitment, but regional quotas show that they’re probably getting at most 25% of what the quotas were allocated to the regions for the recruitment, so they actually are going to have to either double that somehow in terms of the results, which will be hard, or they’re going to have to conduct another partial mobilization one way or another. I mean, you can mobilize production of artillery, you can then over time start to solve defense industrial capacity problems. Russia is a very tight labor market. It has low unemployment. Most of the people with skill sare employed and there’s a big deficit of them, and if you’re going to sustain a war, an attritional war, yes Russia has more people than Ukraine on paper, we all agree on that, by a substantial amount. But once you get past that point and get into the nuts and bolts of what it takes to mobilize personnel and turn them into combat-effective units, you start to see a lot of issues, and this is why Russia is struggling to translate these advantages into decisive outcomes. I think it’s a great point, because Russia may be larger, but this war is not existential to the people of Russia while it is to the people of Ukraine, and so the political willingness to mobilize is probably far greater on the Ukrainian side than on the Russian side. There’s inherent dilemmas – if you mobilize, then people, other people, will leave the country, but you also need those people for your defense industry as well, you need people with skills, right? So they’re very clearly-balancing their own dilemmas.
Bergman: Michael, I think there’s another version of this problem, another way of stating what Michael has just said, and I very much agree with Maria’s assessment that Putin has nothing to worry about at the present moment – December of 2023 – but after the election, and i’ll go out on a limb and say that Putin will win the election in March 2024 – after the election what you’ll have is endless Putinism. He’s been in power since year 200. This is an astonishingly-long period of time for anybody. So endless Putinism I think faces two problems, one of which Michael just mentioned – so, if he has to mobilize, for practical reasons, I think that there’s a kind of complicated psychology to that. You know, we have to start making sacrifices, there’s really no sense of political agency, choice, or alternative. I don’t predict that this would cause any kind of big shift in Russian politics, but among younger people, among mothers, family members, relatives, of course the young men who are in line to go serve on the front, all of that becomes a pressure point, and I think again, projecting 6 months again and 12 months ahead, if Russia doesn’t make meaningful gains, which I think is maybe the most-plausible outcome at the moment, this victory lap that Putin is taking, it starts to look less-and-less credible. At the moment, I think it’s working. Yes, the United States is in one of its periods of political turmoil, yes, the Middle East is in flames, you can sort of project the war as kind of tipping over onto Russia’s side, that’s sort of credible at the moment, but a year from now, if things haven’t changed much and the victory lap has already been taken, that becomes the kind of second problem for endless Putinism. So, we’re not in any sense there yet at some sort of moment of crisis or even of difficulty, but it’s not as if the horizon is cloudless for Putin. I think that it’s a great segue to maybe talk about the elephant in the room or in the entire Ukraine war conversation, and that’s the state of both of US and European aid. Could I just give a quick overview on the EU level. The EU did not in a December European Council meeting approve the 50 billion euros that was on the table and proposed for Ukraine. There is a high degree of confidence, I think, among European leaders, that they’ll be able to get that over the line early in the new year. There’s another meeting set for February 1st, and I think what’s important is that 50 billion is largely for the ukrainian economy and Ukrainian budgetary support also over the course of a number of years. On the US side, you know, we’re recording this Wednesday before Christmas. You can feel Congress having already kind of departed Washington DC, so it doesn’t look like there will be a deal in the Senate when it comes to the Ukraine supplemental and Israel funding and border policy changes at least before the end of the year. Now, that’s going to be on the docket in the new year, but they also have to fund the government, to keep the government open the new year, so it’s starting to come to, you know, the degree of pessimism you’re starting to hear from Congress or from Congressional watchers I think is really growing about the ability of the us to continue to provide military assistance, and Michael, you mentioned, you know, the Europeans are doing a lot, I think they’ve broken a lot of boundaries in terms of what they were willing to do, you know, we see Leopard tanks from Germany in Ukraine, yet when it comes to the kind of core basics to kind of maintain the fight on the front lines of the cluster munitions and artillery, that’s really coming from the United States, so if the US administration’s already announced that if the funding is not renewed, then we’re starting to look at the end of us military support for Ukraine, so let’s talk about what that could mean, because that’s increasingly no longer a theoretical proposition, but one that…I think that if you were going to bet, you would probably bet against us providing support, at least at the level it was providing, and so what does that mean on the battlefield? You can rebut anything I just said as well.
Kofman: Okay, so here’s my view. First, it’s important to make clear there are things the United States provided, as you said, the Europeans simply cannot provide. It’s not just the question of money. Ukraine needs a monthly amount of artillery ammunition just for defensive operations, and we know that [“consumes”?] probably somewhere between 75 and 99,000 main caliber artillery shells per month, just looking at usage rates. The United States provides the overwhelming majority of that monthly artillery ammunition supply and a significant amount of also air defense munitions, although there it’s a bit more variegated with what Europeans provide for their own systems, so just to make that clear, Europe is increasing its production of ammunition. But it’s not simply an issue of money, and the percentage ammunition that Europe provides is quite low. Whatever number you’re thinking of, think of a lower number. All right, the reality of that is that if assistance was cut off now, and at this point it’s running on fumes, so I’m optimistic that there’s going to be a package right when Congress comes back into session, but it’s definitely going to be the money that Ukraine gets for all of 2024, so Ukraine is going to have to use it smartly and efficiently, and after that it’s not clear what Ukraine will see. It depends on elections and elections matter; that’s why we have them in democracies, right, but it’s fair to guess that it’s going to be a decreasing amount of assistance in terms of the financial value of it. So what this tells me is that we’re kind of entering this critical period in the coming year, I think that if suddenly assistance was cut off, Ukraine wouldn’t begin losing tomorrow, but people should appreciate that already there’s an extreme amount of shell hunger at the front line. You know, when I was there in July at the height of the offensive, Ukraine had in the South maybe a 2 to 1 artillery advantage over Russian forces. By November, they were already in a clear deficit with Russia maybe having a 3 to 1 or more advantage and irregular artillery ammunition supplies. At this point, our assistance to Ukraine is literally running on fumes, right? I think they might expect one more package at most that’s left in terms of funding available and that’s it. People need to realize that this has real, practical effects, and the debate and having Ukraine be a political football in the debate has very tangible effects on the front lines. Like, people can drag it out here in DC, bu if they were on the front lines, they might see it a bit differently in terms of the impact that it has on sustainability of Ukraine’s war efforts. So, the EU, Europe, cannot replace the United States in this. I don’t think it’ll be that well positioned to replace the US period even if we were to give it another year, to be perfectly honest. I think that the good news here is that Ukraine can consistently and increasingly offset its requirements by production of drones, of munitions for drones, and other systems that can reduce the load on artillery ammunition, bu tit would also need Western help to do that, Western financial resources, assistance in scaling up industrial production and helping ot ship more of the war effort ot things that Ukraine can itself od in country, because Ukraine has a lot of capacity, a lot of knowhow, but this too will be, I think, part of the effort next year. Let me sort of drill down a little bit on it, because it would strike me that if you’re a Ukrainian military officer and trying to plan for the next few months, it would be incredibly difficult not quite knowing what level of support you’re going to get. So how is Ukraine able to plan for what’s coming from Russia or to lay out any sort of broader operational plans when it comes to the war. So Ukraine is shifting to the defensive because it doesn’t have the artillery ammunition to sustain offensive operations. Nobody can plan, because they don’t know how much artillery ammo they’re going to get next week, so it’s pretty hard to plan operations if you don’t know what resources you’re going to have. And in general, Ukrainian forces are in need of reconstitution right after being 5 months on the offensive. They need to replace casualties, fix issues with force quality they’re addressing right now, looking at core issues – mobilization and what the future sustainability, the war effort is to generate reserves and what-have-you, and also a lot has to be done about training. So there’s a huge amount that the West can do that could have, I think, tremenous returns for fairly low investment on training Ukrainian forces and localizing training in Ukraine, but bottom line to your question, at this point, I think Ukrainians do not know what to expect from us right now. They don’t know what resources they’re going to have; there’s irregularity of supply that has direct effect on combat operations day-to-day, and it’s of course structuring your choices. It’s forcing the Ukrainian military into now focusing on a defensive fight to try to trade as much as they can of the Russian forces who have much of the initiative through the winter. I’m certainly believing in the hope that Congress comes back and authorizes a new supplemenetal package to carry the war effort through the next year, because if they don’t, the results, I think, for Ukraine would be…terrible for how next year might go. I think the optimism we’re seeing from the Kremlin is in part due to their optimism about the inability of Congress to act.
Bergman: Michael one more sort of follow-up question. Because of the casualties that Russia has absorbed, is your sense that their offensive capacity is highly curtailed…Michael, when you think that to the decision that putin made ot invade, it strikes me as important to understand his objectives and what he’s trying to achieve, especially if we could wind up in a situation where Ukraine is on the ropes after being cut off.
(One of the Michaels, probably Kimmage from the content): Well, I think there are two layers to the answer, and I think we have some of the evidence from the initial invasion, the scale of it, and the kinds of ambitions that we can associate with it. We don’t have documents and very good evidence, but I think a partition of the country was what Putin was aiming for. To topple the government. I don’t think to take all of Ukrainian territory, but to roughly absorb half o Ukraine into Russia as he’s attempted to do via the Russia constitution in the south of Ukraine, so we have that as sort of data points, and I think that the hope was that he could do that very quickly and with that in some respects reconstitute Europe and make Russia one of the decisive players in the structure of Europe. Obviously Ukraine is first and foremost, but there’s a European dimension, and that’s the second layer of it. They think that we have to pay very close attention to it. It’s not as a few have alleged, a desire to take Russian troops to Poland or the Baltics or Berlin or Paris. Some Russian soldiers have written those sorts of phrases on their supplies, but that’s, I think, a fantasy that doesn’t especially interest Putin. It would be to leverage this new position in Ukraine, to insert Russia into the European security architecture and to capitalize – this is to go off what Michael said – to go…if the war were to turn very much against Ukraine, to capitalize on the loss of credibility for the United States, so NATO would mean something very different. It wouldn’t disintegrate or disappear because of a lost war in Ukraine, but it would mean something different, and I think that Russia would be eager to press any advantage in that regard and perhaps to take advantage of gray zone issues, and just to make NATO look like a paper tiger, make it look weak, make the United States look like it’s just not capable of being in a meaningful sense the guarantor of security in Europe. I think the stakes are sort of that high. Obviously the humanitarian and human stakes of the war in Ukraine, it should be on our minds first and foremost but the kind of international order stakes in Europe and also by extension sort of other theaters is something that we should think about. I think that we’ve had that sense since the beginning of the war, and yet the urgency that’s there in our societies, the kind of slowness of Europe, and the US turning Ukraine into a political football when it really should properly be a foreign policy challenge or opportunity…the lack of urgency is very odd. It has its roots, I think, in the media. It’s sort of, if Russia were to reverse the huiliation that Russia has experience dover the last couple years, it’s not as if he then sort of retreats and goes home and sort of accepts the fact that Russia has been still very isolated from the international economy and has been treated as a pariah. It concerns me a bit, and I think this is true regardless of what happens on the battlefield is that there’s very little to deter Russia from many of the gray zone, hybrid actions that you know, we were concerned about. Election interference, taking more kinetic actions against civilian infrastructure, and to add one small point there, we’ve celebrated Germany from liberating itsel ffrom its dependenc on Russian energy, in a sense we’ve celebrated ourselves for instituting, what was it, the “sanctions regime from hell” in 2022, and thereafter. I think that what we forget in this narrative is that exactly as these things are happening, Russia has liberated itself from the West. Its dependence on the West is much less than it was, so Russia’s political economy success is such as Maria was describing a moment ago, is going to underwrite a much more autonomous foreign policy and probably a much more amibitious foreig policy and obviously a much more anti-Western foreign policy in the future whether-or-not they make big against on the ground in Ukraine. It’s a factor that we have to keep in mind.
[someone else, I’d guess Bergman given how much he much he rambles; condensing this a great deal]: Yeah, I just want to comment on Mike’s point. I think that we often go from overestimating to underestimating Russia. We’d be better-off dealing with an embittered Russia that feels that it has been defeated than a Russia that hasn’t. I feel like some of the intensification in international conflicts might be linked to the idea that the West isn’t effectively coping with Russia. Iran’s defense industry has been doing comparatively well considering sanctions it’s been under which are much stronger than those that Russia had experienced, which suggests that Russia will be able to maintain levels of production of at least less-sophisticated weapons well. And there’s what this signals to China. Mike, I think that you’ve outlined what I think is still a fairly promising outlook for Ukraine. 2024 I think will be tough, but Russia hasn’t been able to go on offensive effectively. If Ukraine can absorb that over the next year, rebuild forces, train its troops, then 2025 is looking a lot more promising I think for Ukraine militarily. I’d like to see how you see talk about this being a long war; I’m curious how you see this playing out positive way for Ukraine.
[Someone else, probably Kofman]: I see next year as a potential turning point, and the way I look at this that there is very much a theory of success for Ukraine. If Ukraine is able to defend against Russian offensives at the peak of Russian defense spending and investment in their military such the Russian leadership concedes that despite everything they’re putting into the defense industry they’re not able to attain even their minimal aims. Secondly, Ukraine uses next year to reconstitute its forces, that talks about force quality, manpower, rotating brigades, solving training issues, the industrial capacity production of key systems and drones. Ukraine has been the beneficiary of a lot of Western assistance, but this has created a zoo of equipment of different types and in every single category and this requires a lot of maintenance and increasing the capacity to actually repair it. When you’re there, you’ll can see…you’ll be surprised by what Ukrainians can do already in terms of maintaining and repairing the equipment and making entirely new parts for it. I’ve seen this myself, and the third part of it is a strike part, which is Ukraine is increasing its indigenous capacity to build strike systems and conduct certain types of campaigns for Russian critical infrastructure, Russian basing, Russian logistics, and can still create issues or dilemmas for the Russian military. The front line will be difficult to move. There aren’t the resources for a major Ukrainian offensive of next year. Ukraine can use next year effectively to set the conditions to retake the advantage. Fundamentally, we are in the long game now; much of this war had been subject to short-termism in planning in the West, and we’ve basically been going from one six-month to another. I said, regarding the counteroffensive, with my colleague Rob Lee, that this offensive itself will not end or resolve the war. It will require a long-term plan and long-term investment. Now at least short-term thinking creates the oppoertunity to develop a long-term strategy for how you are going to sustain the war as a long-term effort, and what are the things you need to do next year to change the picture and restore the capacity for Ukraine to attain its objectives in the war come late next year or 2025. You kown I’m not known for being [illegible] or an optimist. So when I say that I do see prospects for using the next year successfully, I do see it and do believe it. I don’t know if we’re going to get there. Certainly what I’ve seen from our own Congress here in Washington DC over the last three months is not encouraging to an analyst. I don’t know that even though we have the technological innovation, the financial capital, and we have all the advantages in the west, if you just look at the balance sheet…
[someone else, maybe Bergman]: If we look at the overall balance o fmateriel availability and potential and capacity in the West versus Russia, you would think that this is almost a no-brainer, but you see the political will and making decisions at the right time and all this are the critical factors. There’s been talk of Ukraine doing its own mobilization of hundreds of thousands of additional men being called up. What do you think, would that make a difference? Is that something that you’re looking for?
[I’m having a hard time distinguishing between who is talking here. There’s discussion of mobilization, the fact that it’s harder for older men to fight as well, and that some units in Ukraine only recently got vacation and rotation off the front.]
Bergman: Maria, I want to turn to you about kind of future prospects o fthe Russian economy as we look out over the next year. I think Mike has always been a sanctions pessimist. I’ve been a sanctions optimist, and right now, Mike may be slightly winning that conversation, but it does strike me that Russia is running its economy quite hot. We’re seeing inflation start to go up, there’s labor challenges, now if Russia has to do another partial mobilization, that will put a lot of strain on the Russian economy. How do you see this sort of playing out. Let’s take the optimistic view: Ukraine is able to hold on as Russia goes on the offensive for much of this year, Russia probably doesn’t gain very much. Maybe it loses quite a lot in terms of man power and resources. Where do you think that the Russian economy will be in six months, a year or now, or what are the vulnerabilities there?
Snegovaya: So when it comes to material factors like how much it costs for Russia to run this war [illegible] economist has estimated that Russia can pull it off forever, at the very least for within the foreseeable future, and given Putin’s international amibition that we’ve discussed here he’d probably want to have…there are other factors that are accumulating. They’re not decisive in any way at this point, but certaily some of them at some point may skyrocket. The first one is inflation in general…for the lack of external investment. Russia is only maintaining its economy by essentially some sort of Keynesian policy of investing its own resources into the economy, which always leads to inflation. Russia is no exception; the official numbers of inflation are very unreliable but it certainly…the unofficial numbers are certainly above 10%. Lots of complaining about the price of eggs and certainly some of the problems are emerging such as disappearance of eggs or other items. That is also combined with so-called regressive import substitution, where Russia is unable to get the best possible articles at the give price because fo the sanctions, so they have to find other ways to import something that’s potentially-inferior in quality and also more expensive because of all the supply chains that they have to restructure in the long term that certainly might be accumulating and contributing to the war fatigue. There is also a less-notable exchaustion of the rainy day fund that’s also happening. So, for example, the national wellbeing fund is slowly getting eroded, and it’s unclear how much more it will take until its totally gone. While the Kremlin does have the resources right now, as we have discussed, due to variable energy dynamic in the long term, especially if there is a shock…let’s imagine something happens and the oil prices dramatically fall. This is where there will be a lot of problems for the Kremlin all of a sudden, because they just don’t any longer have these resources that they accumulated. This is partly because of the sanctions, for example the freezing of the Central Bank of Russia reserves. They do contribute, because now Russia has no resources to maintain the ruble, and it keeps flucuturing to the extent that they can maintain they have to use the resources they are not accumulating…so it’s not ideal. Essentially, if there is an economic shock, it will be a problem, and it might create the chain of unforseeable events which will be problematic for the regime. Then of course, there’s labor deficit. There is unprecedented, low, low levels of unemployment, and that contributes to the limitation and furtuer overheats the economy. Last but not the least, this also created this…uh…perhaps a war economy. It’s not a really militarized economy in the Soviet sense, but it does…the economy really runs to a large extent on the military expenses, and this creates this trap for the Kremlin that it really can’t stop the war even if they wanted to, beause then there’s not any other kind of factor that will create the GDP growth, that will create this push for the economy, so essentially they trap themselves in this situation which potentially can skyrocket. None of these factors as we have discussed is catastrophic at the moment, bu tthey do have this quality of accumulating and, uh, say in Argentina, we’ve seen a decade of inflation which was really problematic for in the long term for the governments. So it does tend overall to accumulate and create problems. Having said that, probably we should not be basing our hopes on just this analysis and I want to echo Michael Kofman in his call for the importance of rethinking and actually coming up with a long-term strategy in the West. One of the problems why we’re having all of these ocnversations is the lack of long-term strategy on the side of the US and European administrations, like: how do they really see this war going? What is it that they’re trying to achieve for Ukraine? Once they have that clear goal in mind, maybe they can contribute certain resources given how important this war is. Max, I have a summing up statement for you. It’s a paraphrase of the Austrian humorist Carl Krauss, and you know you could take his words and rework thema nd say that the situation in the west is hopeless but not serious and the situation in Ukraine is serious but not hopeless, and I think that may sum up our conversation today. So if the West can become more-serious, it renders the situation in Ukraine less-hopeless.
Bergman: I think that’s a great short summary. I think that’s a really great way to encapsulated it, that in some ways continuing to support Ukraine is not…it’s not causing our price of eggs to increase. It’s having very little, almost no impact on the United States. In fact, almost all of it is going into US defense production and expanding US defense production which supports American jobs and actually expands our defense industrial production which is seen as one of the major things that have happened. Well, we’re out of time, so we’re going to have to wrap it up.
I can’t listen to this right now, but I’ll try to put up a cleaned up form for anyone who just wants to read. Youtube has an auto-generated transcript. That’s kinda mangled and can’t identify speakers, so I’m trying to do so from the text, and might make an error or two identifying speakers.
The host is Max Bergman, and other participants Maria Snegovaya, Michael Kimmage, and Michael Kofman.
Reading through it and putting up a summary/cleaned up transcript:
Kofman: The Ukrainian offensive culminated around October. The fighting has taken on a more attritional character. Russia had attempted its own offensive starting October 10th and has been attacking along the line in an attempt to seize the initiative. To some extent, Russia does have the initiative, but they do not at this point have any major breakthroughs or successes that they can point to. I think what we’re going to see is a period of traditional fighting this winter, not too-dissimilar to the period we saw last winter. Next year is going to be a challenging year. To some extent, Russia has the materiel advantage on its side if we look at ammunition availability, maybe a bit equipment, and to a much lesser extent manpower. That being said, these advantages are not decisive, so we shouldn’t consider the outcome to be determined by them.
Bergman: Russia has worked on increasing industrial output over the past year. I think at RUSI, our colleagues have determined that Russia had been producing roughly 40 long-range cruise missiles a month, and has gotten that up to over 100. Are you expecting Russia to try to do what it did last winter and bombard Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure? Have we seen that already this winter? Is that something that you’re concerned about in terms of air defense munitions?
Kofman: The two treadmills we’ve been on for the whole war have been artillery ammunition, which has been essential for Ukraine to sustain defensive efforts, and the other is air defense ammunition. Interceptors for air defense and missile defense. I think that we’ve already seen the beginning of a Russian strike campaign. It began in November, with a fairly large drone strike. I think that Russia is this time trying to test saturation of the air defense systems provided to Ukraine by the West, but is going to come after infrastructure again. Both Russian missile and drone production have been increasing. They are license-producing Iranian drone, the sort of various variations of Shahed and as those stocks increase, the West has been working to try to improve the air defense situation as well. In this regard, Ukraine is in a bit of a dilemma. Ukraine is a very large country, the second-largest in Europe after Russia, and it’s challenging to defend key cities, critical infrastructure, electricity, water management, power plants, right, the things that people need to make it through the winter, and also defend the front line. The line of contact is about a thousand kilometers long. I hope people appreciate that it’s a very lengthy front, and it’s very difficult to provide air defense along the front line as well. So far Ukraine has been able to manage the situation with Western assistance and has gotten through the past winter, but much of these things are contingent. You don’t know how cold the winter is going to be for example, and what kind of stocks the Russians have or what kind of reserves are available for Ukrainian air defense. I don’t see the picture necessarily as dire, but I do think that it’s a very important aspect of the fight to look at beyond just what’s happening at the front line.
Bergman: Maria, maybe you could talk a little bit about the state of the Russian economy and Russia’s defense industry? We put out a report earlier this year which said that sanctions were impacting Russia’s ability to ramp up defense production, but it looks like during an intervening period of time over this year they’ve been able to address that. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but Russia is adjusting very successfully to sanctions, and the overall export controls are not working to the extent that…for example, Russia is actually importing more of the sanctioned chips and related electronics than it did before the war started through third countries, as we know Central Asia, China, other countries that are assisting Russia in doing that.
Snegovaya (or perhaps Bergman): Unfortunately there are no good reliable estimates that are more objective, but Russia itself is reporting a very successful increase in defense production. According to Bloomberg’s reporting, the Kremlin projected through 2023 the production of combat vehicles, aircraft and ships to grow by more than 26% and unreadable recently has reported that it increased production of tanks seven times, light armed armored vehicles by 4.5 times and MLRS systems by 2.5 times. There’s also a drone situation where it seems like the inflection point was passed in the summer and right now Russia is surpassing Ukraine in production of drones, which was we know are highly important in this war.
Bergman: So – again these are the Kremlin estimates, that should be taken with a grain of salt – having said that, what we’ve seen unfortunately successes that Russia is preparing for a very successful perhaps offensive or at least doubling-down on the war and has resources to do that when compared with the situation in Ukraine and especially Western aid to Ukraine. Mike, let me turn back to you on that: are we seeing the battlefield effects of Russia having that materiel advantage and what are the prospects for us and European defense industrial efforts to ramp up? I mean, I think that’s occurring somewhat when it comes to 152mm ammunition but in general there’s, I think, a sense that we’re not matching Russia’s defense mobilization. How do you see the defense-industrial side of this?
Kofman: Sure. So, first, in terms of observed outcome on the battlefield, I think fortunately, the Russian military has consistently chosen to attack prematurely before the force quality is there and before they’re ready, on the basis of feeling like they have the numbers, equipment, and artillery ammunition to do it, and these offenses have been unsuccessful. They’ve shown that with advantages they have, they’re not sufficiently decisive either in firepower, in force employment, and in tactics. And the actual quality of the force, it takes time to restore quality of the force – an army is not just equipment and ammunition. On top of that, I think what one can observe is that while it’s true that Russia has substantially transitioned to a wartime economy and is now spending a significant amount of government revenue on defense, industrial output is actually using this as a primary vehicle to drive manufacturing and GPD growth. They still have significant issues with equipment. I think that the numbers that they put out are far too fanciful, and are counting way too much in those numbers. They are counting equipment that they serviced and repaired, equipment they’re pulling out of storage. The majority of the equipment they are still using they’re pulling out of warehouses. This is the Soviet legacy they inherited. They’re increasing production of equipment in key categories like missiles, for example, like drones and more-modern tanks like T-90M, but it’s slow. You can observe literally from satellite them building additional facilities along these complexes on assembly plants, meaning they may be making the investments, the industrial capacity is physically growing, they’re starting to expand it, but I don’t know if they will able to translate that into significant battlefield gains next year. That very much remains to be seen.
Kofman: Okay, regarding the question on defense and industrial mobilization, yes. So, the Russian decisions were clearly made starting last fall when they went through with partial mobilization of personnel, began to realize this is going to be a long war and started to actually convert the economy to this wartime footing, started making those choices that they were basically neglecting to make over the course of the first year. On the Western side, I think it’s really only now started to occur that this is indeed going to be a long war. If you look at the US, yes, we made investments in artillery ammunition production. It’s going a bit slower than I expected, but it’s a lot better than it was. We started the war making 14,000 main caliber artillery shells per month. We’re now making 28,000 and we’re going towards 36. That’s pretty good. I would say that for a year and a half’s worth of work, Europeans cannot tell the same story at all – I just want to be clear on that, and I’ve been publicly clear that I think North Korea has given Russia more artillery ammunition than Europe has given Ukraine. That’s just one category of munitions; I don’t want to discredit all the things Europe has done for Ukraine. They’ve done a lot – they’ve done a lot of other…in terms of material outcomes in a war that runs on artillery ammunition, air defense ammunition, drones, we’re just seriously getting about the business of looking at this as a long war that requires a long-term strategy, and next year will require those investments in industrial capacity both in Ukraine – which increasingly can make drones, can make these systems – but more-importantly in the West is we’re actually going to have to see and follow through, right, we cannot have a case where 13 months into the war Europeans pledge a million artillery shells and then they say that they can barely do half of that by the end of, you know, over two years into this war and then we’ll see what comes in the third year. Like, I think we’re going to have to do a lot better if we’re going to properly support Ukraine and see this conflict through.
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Bergman: Michael, I want to turn to you, one of the questions I think right now that I have is what are Putin’s objectives in this war? I think that there was perhasp a hope by some that if – you know, Ukraine’s counteroffensive didn’t go as well as expected or failed, however you want to categorize it, but that this would sort of sober up the Ukrainians to say "Okay, well, we’re not going to be able to achieve our goals on the battlefield and that now’s the time for negotiations, but it doesn’t seem like there’s any interest coming from the Kremlin. How do you read? Is there a potential negotiation here if aid is potentially drying up from botht he United States and Europe?
Kimmage: It’s good to be agnostic about what we know, which is quite-little of an objective kind. I think that we could begin the analysis with public media displays in Russia over the course of the last couple of weeks where there have been a lot of victory laps that Putin has been taking. Of course, he’s running for president in March, so part of this is self-promotion, and Putin has lots of incentives to say that the war is going very well, but they’ve really been pouring it on thick in the Russian media that the West is crumbling, that Ukraine is on its last legs, and Russia is on the verge of achieve victory, so it would be very difficult to reconcile that narrative with any kind of compromise or negotiation coming form the Russian side. Additionally the 7th of October [the Hamas attack on Israel] and its many complicated, uh, aftereffects in the Middle East and globally…I think one has to say have rebounded to Russia’s advantage. Not on the ground in the Middle East and not on the ground in Ukraine, but the narratives that Russia is able to project now with greater confidence that I think are also hardening the Russian position, which was hard to begin with. And then, of course, the optics both in Europe and the United States of political division, which is to a degree quite real. Some of it may be fragmentary and momentary, but it’s hard to say that the EU and the US Congress are firmly behind any one position on the war. Those optics are also, I think, feeding into a mood of self-confidence, so as I interpret it, it’s sort of half-projected, half-theatrical, because I think that Russia has to know that it faces a huge number of real-life challenges in Ukraine and is very far from achieving its political objectives. On the other hand, I think Putin has multiple legs on which to stand, and the ones that Maria mentioned about political economy are also very significant, so I think that you have to infer from all of that that this is probably the worst time in the war for any kind of serious negotiations and Maria, there’s an election coming up in Russia, I’m curious what your take is on kind of the public mood inside of Russia when it comes to this war. Is there any sort of softening of support or is there a danger there for Putin when it comes to the public opinion?
Snegovaya: I wouldn’t frame it in terms of a danger. I think that Putin is feeling pretty comfortable when it comes to the public opinion, partly because the Kremlin was quite apt at adapting to this new reality by committing a lot of resources toward those families that are directly or indirectly participating in this war. This is the term that the economy of death in which many of the families of the Russian soldiers or those who died in this conflict receive a lot of pyments and sometimes these are quite significant enough to, for example, purchase an apartment in certain remote Russian regions. Plus, when it comes to the elites, despite the fact that many of them lost because of the sanctions the ability to, for example, travel to the West, enjoy the luxurious lifestyles, they are compensated domestically through redistribution of property which is very radical and relevant in Russia right now as many Western companies fled the country after the war began. These valuable resources are redistributed to these groups. In addition to that, as we have discussed with Michael, the military-industrial sector is getting a lot of money, and that creates their own stakeholders as a result. Last year alone the number of dollar millionaires in Russia, despite these unprecedented sanctions from hell, increased by more than 10 percentage points, and I’m afraid that this dynamic will continue in the sense that there are a lot of new stakeholders that the war has created. This is, by the way, not unique to this war. Wars usually create stakeholders and this is likely to continue, so that is one factor. Second, of course there is a degree of war fatigue combined with the fact that Russia really experienced unprecedented losses in this war. I think by certain estimates up to 300,000 people are incapacitated or dead on the Russian side. This to the best of our knowledge exceeds significantly the Afghanistan losses that actually contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union and yet we barely see any protest. Just recently, there was some development – the wives of the mobilized Russians started isolated protests, but those are quite marginal and the Kremlin is trying to take them under control. Again, when it comes to the war fatigue, we have seen lately in the polls that the number of Russians who are in favor of peace talks has somewhat increased but again, with a Russian spin to it, these are the people who want to keep everything that Russia gained in the war, so not any concessions, without any concessions to Ukraine, and again those groups do not constitute the majority. It’s perhaps up to 30% of the population. The majority seems to go with the flow. Lastly, Russia has very pronounced electoral cycles. So Mike Kimmage has mentioned that Putin has re-election in March 2024. In light of that, he’s recently announced new redistribution to families with multiple kids, etc, etc. That’s very typical, but that certainly will be probably be enough to sustain support, and last but not least, this election – Russian elections have a degree of fraud, so this election is not going to be an exception. They are adopting all of the lessons learned from the constitutional vote in 2020 in including the vote period for up to three days voting outside of electoral precincts and of course the Internet-based, the so-called electronic voting which makes any monitoring of this election impossible. Last, but not least, they also pretty much imprisoned or repressed most of the independent observers, so if there still was somebody left who wanted to monitor the election, there’s really no such people left in the country. So this dynamic really makes things very comfortable for Putin. I think that he has really nothing to be scared of.
Bergman: Mike, you wanted to jump in?
[One of the Michaels, I assume Kofman from the subject matter]: Yeah, I just wanted to jump in briefly and it’s on the manpower issue. So I think the one area where Russia’s principally-challenged is manpower. It seems that there are big error bars on this in terms of our knowledge of Russian losses and recruitment rates, but it’s definitely fair to say that there total casualties exceed 300,000 and of those you can assume that maybe two-thirds, or 70% are uncrecoverable casualties. They were already at reduced strength, and the challenge they principially face – I want to come in this because Maria made a great point, you know. These mothers protesting, it’s not a big issue yet. It’s a symptom of a problem, of a structural problem. Russia was able to alleviate the deficit of manpower with mobilization, and they can recruit enough men per month to compensate for their losses, but they don’t have men to rotate. The people they mobilize and so they’ve been staying at the front, and they’ve been at the front since last fall, right, and they’re going to have to figure out a way to deal with that problem, and probably they’re not going to address it until after the March election because of the political challenges involved. But they will have to substantially increase recruitment, but regional quotas show that they’re probably getting at most 25% of what the quotas were allocated to the regions for the recruitment, so they actually are going to have to either double that somehow in terms of the results, which will be hard, or they’re going to have to conduct another partial mobilization one way or another. I mean, you can mobilize production of artillery, you can then over time start to solve defense industrial capacity problems. Russia is a very tight labor market. It has low unemployment. Most of the people with skill sare employed and there’s a big deficit of them, and if you’re going to sustain a war, an attritional war, yes Russia has more people than Ukraine on paper, we all agree on that, by a substantial amount. But once you get past that point and get into the nuts and bolts of what it takes to mobilize personnel and turn them into combat-effective units, you start to see a lot of issues, and this is why Russia is struggling to translate these advantages into decisive outcomes. I think it’s a great point, because Russia may be larger, but this war is not existential to the people of Russia while it is to the people of Ukraine, and so the political willingness to mobilize is probably far greater on the Ukrainian side than on the Russian side. There’s inherent dilemmas – if you mobilize, then people, other people, will leave the country, but you also need those people for your defense industry as well, you need people with skills, right? So they’re very clearly-balancing their own dilemmas.
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Bergman: Michael, I think there’s another version of this problem, another way of stating what Michael has just said, and I very much agree with Maria’s assessment that Putin has nothing to worry about at the present moment – December of 2023 – but after the election, and i’ll go out on a limb and say that Putin will win the election in March 2024 – after the election what you’ll have is endless Putinism. He’s been in power since year 200. This is an astonishingly-long period of time for anybody. So endless Putinism I think faces two problems, one of which Michael just mentioned – so, if he has to mobilize, for practical reasons, I think that there’s a kind of complicated psychology to that. You know, we have to start making sacrifices, there’s really no sense of political agency, choice, or alternative. I don’t predict that this would cause any kind of big shift in Russian politics, but among younger people, among mothers, family members, relatives, of course the young men who are in line to go serve on the front, all of that becomes a pressure point, and I think again, projecting 6 months again and 12 months ahead, if Russia doesn’t make meaningful gains, which I think is maybe the most-plausible outcome at the moment, this victory lap that Putin is taking, it starts to look less-and-less credible. At the moment, I think it’s working. Yes, the United States is in one of its periods of political turmoil, yes, the Middle East is in flames, you can sort of project the war as kind of tipping over onto Russia’s side, that’s sort of credible at the moment, but a year from now, if things haven’t changed much and the victory lap has already been taken, that becomes the kind of second problem for endless Putinism. So, we’re not in any sense there yet at some sort of moment of crisis or even of difficulty, but it’s not as if the horizon is cloudless for Putin. I think that it’s a great segue to maybe talk about the elephant in the room or in the entire Ukraine war conversation, and that’s the state of both of US and European aid. Could I just give a quick overview on the EU level. The EU did not in a December European Council meeting approve the 50 billion euros that was on the table and proposed for Ukraine. There is a high degree of confidence, I think, among European leaders, that they’ll be able to get that over the line early in the new year. There’s another meeting set for February 1st, and I think what’s important is that 50 billion is largely for the ukrainian economy and Ukrainian budgetary support also over the course of a number of years. On the US side, you know, we’re recording this Wednesday before Christmas. You can feel Congress having already kind of departed Washington DC, so it doesn’t look like there will be a deal in the Senate when it comes to the Ukraine supplemental and Israel funding and border policy changes at least before the end of the year. Now, that’s going to be on the docket in the new year, but they also have to fund the government, to keep the government open the new year, so it’s starting to come to, you know, the degree of pessimism you’re starting to hear from Congress or from Congressional watchers I think is really growing about the ability of the us to continue to provide military assistance, and Michael, you mentioned, you know, the Europeans are doing a lot, I think they’ve broken a lot of boundaries in terms of what they were willing to do, you know, we see Leopard tanks from Germany in Ukraine, yet when it comes to the kind of core basics to kind of maintain the fight on the front lines of the cluster munitions and artillery, that’s really coming from the United States, so if the US administration’s already announced that if the funding is not renewed, then we’re starting to look at the end of us military support for Ukraine, so let’s talk about what that could mean, because that’s increasingly no longer a theoretical proposition, but one that…I think that if you were going to bet, you would probably bet against us providing support, at least at the level it was providing, and so what does that mean on the battlefield? You can rebut anything I just said as well.
Kofman: Okay, so here’s my view. First, it’s important to make clear there are things the United States provided, as you said, the Europeans simply cannot provide. It’s not just the question of money. Ukraine needs a monthly amount of artillery ammunition just for defensive operations, and we know that [“consumes”?] probably somewhere between 75 and 99,000 main caliber artillery shells per month, just looking at usage rates. The United States provides the overwhelming majority of that monthly artillery ammunition supply and a significant amount of also air defense munitions, although there it’s a bit more variegated with what Europeans provide for their own systems, so just to make that clear, Europe is increasing its production of ammunition. But it’s not simply an issue of money, and the percentage ammunition that Europe provides is quite low. Whatever number you’re thinking of, think of a lower number. All right, the reality of that is that if assistance was cut off now, and at this point it’s running on fumes, so I’m optimistic that there’s going to be a package right when Congress comes back into session, but it’s definitely going to be the money that Ukraine gets for all of 2024, so Ukraine is going to have to use it smartly and efficiently, and after that it’s not clear what Ukraine will see. It depends on elections and elections matter; that’s why we have them in democracies, right, but it’s fair to guess that it’s going to be a decreasing amount of assistance in terms of the financial value of it. So what this tells me is that we’re kind of entering this critical period in the coming year, I think that if suddenly assistance was cut off, Ukraine wouldn’t begin losing tomorrow, but people should appreciate that already there’s an extreme amount of shell hunger at the front line. You know, when I was there in July at the height of the offensive, Ukraine had in the South maybe a 2 to 1 artillery advantage over Russian forces. By November, they were already in a clear deficit with Russia maybe having a 3 to 1 or more advantage and irregular artillery ammunition supplies. At this point, our assistance to Ukraine is literally running on fumes, right? I think they might expect one more package at most that’s left in terms of funding available and that’s it. People need to realize that this has real, practical effects, and the debate and having Ukraine be a political football in the debate has very tangible effects on the front lines. Like, people can drag it out here in DC, bu if they were on the front lines, they might see it a bit differently in terms of the impact that it has on sustainability of Ukraine’s war efforts. So, the EU, Europe, cannot replace the United States in this. I don’t think it’ll be that well positioned to replace the US period even if we were to give it another year, to be perfectly honest. I think that the good news here is that Ukraine can consistently and increasingly offset its requirements by production of drones, of munitions for drones, and other systems that can reduce the load on artillery ammunition, bu tit would also need Western help to do that, Western financial resources, assistance in scaling up industrial production and helping ot ship more of the war effort ot things that Ukraine can itself od in country, because Ukraine has a lot of capacity, a lot of knowhow, but this too will be, I think, part of the effort next year. Let me sort of drill down a little bit on it, because it would strike me that if you’re a Ukrainian military officer and trying to plan for the next few months, it would be incredibly difficult not quite knowing what level of support you’re going to get. So how is Ukraine able to plan for what’s coming from Russia or to lay out any sort of broader operational plans when it comes to the war. So Ukraine is shifting to the defensive because it doesn’t have the artillery ammunition to sustain offensive operations. Nobody can plan, because they don’t know how much artillery ammo they’re going to get next week, so it’s pretty hard to plan operations if you don’t know what resources you’re going to have. And in general, Ukrainian forces are in need of reconstitution right after being 5 months on the offensive. They need to replace casualties, fix issues with force quality they’re addressing right now, looking at core issues – mobilization and what the future sustainability, the war effort is to generate reserves and what-have-you, and also a lot has to be done about training. So there’s a huge amount that the West can do that could have, I think, tremenous returns for fairly low investment on training Ukrainian forces and localizing training in Ukraine, but bottom line to your question, at this point, I think Ukrainians do not know what to expect from us right now. They don’t know what resources they’re going to have; there’s irregularity of supply that has direct effect on combat operations day-to-day, and it’s of course structuring your choices. It’s forcing the Ukrainian military into now focusing on a defensive fight to try to trade as much as they can of the Russian forces who have much of the initiative through the winter. I’m certainly believing in the hope that Congress comes back and authorizes a new supplemenetal package to carry the war effort through the next year, because if they don’t, the results, I think, for Ukraine would be…terrible for how next year might go. I think the optimism we’re seeing from the Kremlin is in part due to their optimism about the inability of Congress to act.
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Bergman: Michael one more sort of follow-up question. Because of the casualties that Russia has absorbed, is your sense that their offensive capacity is highly curtailed…Michael, when you think that to the decision that putin made ot invade, it strikes me as important to understand his objectives and what he’s trying to achieve, especially if we could wind up in a situation where Ukraine is on the ropes after being cut off.
(One of the Michaels, probably Kimmage from the content): Well, I think there are two layers to the answer, and I think we have some of the evidence from the initial invasion, the scale of it, and the kinds of ambitions that we can associate with it. We don’t have documents and very good evidence, but I think a partition of the country was what Putin was aiming for. To topple the government. I don’t think to take all of Ukrainian territory, but to roughly absorb half o Ukraine into Russia as he’s attempted to do via the Russia constitution in the south of Ukraine, so we have that as sort of data points, and I think that the hope was that he could do that very quickly and with that in some respects reconstitute Europe and make Russia one of the decisive players in the structure of Europe. Obviously Ukraine is first and foremost, but there’s a European dimension, and that’s the second layer of it. They think that we have to pay very close attention to it. It’s not as a few have alleged, a desire to take Russian troops to Poland or the Baltics or Berlin or Paris. Some Russian soldiers have written those sorts of phrases on their supplies, but that’s, I think, a fantasy that doesn’t especially interest Putin. It would be to leverage this new position in Ukraine, to insert Russia into the European security architecture and to capitalize – this is to go off what Michael said – to go…if the war were to turn very much against Ukraine, to capitalize on the loss of credibility for the United States, so NATO would mean something very different. It wouldn’t disintegrate or disappear because of a lost war in Ukraine, but it would mean something different, and I think that Russia would be eager to press any advantage in that regard and perhaps to take advantage of gray zone issues, and just to make NATO look like a paper tiger, make it look weak, make the United States look like it’s just not capable of being in a meaningful sense the guarantor of security in Europe. I think the stakes are sort of that high. Obviously the humanitarian and human stakes of the war in Ukraine, it should be on our minds first and foremost but the kind of international order stakes in Europe and also by extension sort of other theaters is something that we should think about. I think that we’ve had that sense since the beginning of the war, and yet the urgency that’s there in our societies, the kind of slowness of Europe, and the US turning Ukraine into a political football when it really should properly be a foreign policy challenge or opportunity…the lack of urgency is very odd. It has its roots, I think, in the media. It’s sort of, if Russia were to reverse the huiliation that Russia has experience dover the last couple years, it’s not as if he then sort of retreats and goes home and sort of accepts the fact that Russia has been still very isolated from the international economy and has been treated as a pariah. It concerns me a bit, and I think this is true regardless of what happens on the battlefield is that there’s very little to deter Russia from many of the gray zone, hybrid actions that you know, we were concerned about. Election interference, taking more kinetic actions against civilian infrastructure, and to add one small point there, we’ve celebrated Germany from liberating itsel ffrom its dependenc on Russian energy, in a sense we’ve celebrated ourselves for instituting, what was it, the “sanctions regime from hell” in 2022, and thereafter. I think that what we forget in this narrative is that exactly as these things are happening, Russia has liberated itself from the West. Its dependence on the West is much less than it was, so Russia’s political economy success is such as Maria was describing a moment ago, is going to underwrite a much more autonomous foreign policy and probably a much more amibitious foreig policy and obviously a much more anti-Western foreign policy in the future whether-or-not they make big against on the ground in Ukraine. It’s a factor that we have to keep in mind.
[someone else, I’d guess Bergman given how much he much he rambles; condensing this a great deal]: Yeah, I just want to comment on Mike’s point. I think that we often go from overestimating to underestimating Russia. We’d be better-off dealing with an embittered Russia that feels that it has been defeated than a Russia that hasn’t. I feel like some of the intensification in international conflicts might be linked to the idea that the West isn’t effectively coping with Russia. Iran’s defense industry has been doing comparatively well considering sanctions it’s been under which are much stronger than those that Russia had experienced, which suggests that Russia will be able to maintain levels of production of at least less-sophisticated weapons well. And there’s what this signals to China. Mike, I think that you’ve outlined what I think is still a fairly promising outlook for Ukraine. 2024 I think will be tough, but Russia hasn’t been able to go on offensive effectively. If Ukraine can absorb that over the next year, rebuild forces, train its troops, then 2025 is looking a lot more promising I think for Ukraine militarily. I’d like to see how you see talk about this being a long war; I’m curious how you see this playing out positive way for Ukraine.
[Someone else, probably Kofman]: I see next year as a potential turning point, and the way I look at this that there is very much a theory of success for Ukraine. If Ukraine is able to defend against Russian offensives at the peak of Russian defense spending and investment in their military such the Russian leadership concedes that despite everything they’re putting into the defense industry they’re not able to attain even their minimal aims. Secondly, Ukraine uses next year to reconstitute its forces, that talks about force quality, manpower, rotating brigades, solving training issues, the industrial capacity production of key systems and drones. Ukraine has been the beneficiary of a lot of Western assistance, but this has created a zoo of equipment of different types and in every single category and this requires a lot of maintenance and increasing the capacity to actually repair it. When you’re there, you’ll can see…you’ll be surprised by what Ukrainians can do already in terms of maintaining and repairing the equipment and making entirely new parts for it. I’ve seen this myself, and the third part of it is a strike part, which is Ukraine is increasing its indigenous capacity to build strike systems and conduct certain types of campaigns for Russian critical infrastructure, Russian basing, Russian logistics, and can still create issues or dilemmas for the Russian military. The front line will be difficult to move. There aren’t the resources for a major Ukrainian offensive of next year. Ukraine can use next year effectively to set the conditions to retake the advantage. Fundamentally, we are in the long game now; much of this war had been subject to short-termism in planning in the West, and we’ve basically been going from one six-month to another. I said, regarding the counteroffensive, with my colleague Rob Lee, that this offensive itself will not end or resolve the war. It will require a long-term plan and long-term investment. Now at least short-term thinking creates the oppoertunity to develop a long-term strategy for how you are going to sustain the war as a long-term effort, and what are the things you need to do next year to change the picture and restore the capacity for Ukraine to attain its objectives in the war come late next year or 2025. You kown I’m not known for being [illegible] or an optimist. So when I say that I do see prospects for using the next year successfully, I do see it and do believe it. I don’t know if we’re going to get there. Certainly what I’ve seen from our own Congress here in Washington DC over the last three months is not encouraging to an analyst. I don’t know that even though we have the technological innovation, the financial capital, and we have all the advantages in the west, if you just look at the balance sheet…
[someone else, maybe Bergman]: If we look at the overall balance o fmateriel availability and potential and capacity in the West versus Russia, you would think that this is almost a no-brainer, but you see the political will and making decisions at the right time and all this are the critical factors. There’s been talk of Ukraine doing its own mobilization of hundreds of thousands of additional men being called up. What do you think, would that make a difference? Is that something that you’re looking for?
[I’m having a hard time distinguishing between who is talking here. There’s discussion of mobilization, the fact that it’s harder for older men to fight as well, and that some units in Ukraine only recently got vacation and rotation off the front.]
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Bergman: Maria, I want to turn to you about kind of future prospects o fthe Russian economy as we look out over the next year. I think Mike has always been a sanctions pessimist. I’ve been a sanctions optimist, and right now, Mike may be slightly winning that conversation, but it does strike me that Russia is running its economy quite hot. We’re seeing inflation start to go up, there’s labor challenges, now if Russia has to do another partial mobilization, that will put a lot of strain on the Russian economy. How do you see this sort of playing out. Let’s take the optimistic view: Ukraine is able to hold on as Russia goes on the offensive for much of this year, Russia probably doesn’t gain very much. Maybe it loses quite a lot in terms of man power and resources. Where do you think that the Russian economy will be in six months, a year or now, or what are the vulnerabilities there?
Snegovaya: So when it comes to material factors like how much it costs for Russia to run this war [illegible] economist has estimated that Russia can pull it off forever, at the very least for within the foreseeable future, and given Putin’s international amibition that we’ve discussed here he’d probably want to have…there are other factors that are accumulating. They’re not decisive in any way at this point, but certaily some of them at some point may skyrocket. The first one is inflation in general…for the lack of external investment. Russia is only maintaining its economy by essentially some sort of Keynesian policy of investing its own resources into the economy, which always leads to inflation. Russia is no exception; the official numbers of inflation are very unreliable but it certainly…the unofficial numbers are certainly above 10%. Lots of complaining about the price of eggs and certainly some of the problems are emerging such as disappearance of eggs or other items. That is also combined with so-called regressive import substitution, where Russia is unable to get the best possible articles at the give price because fo the sanctions, so they have to find other ways to import something that’s potentially-inferior in quality and also more expensive because of all the supply chains that they have to restructure in the long term that certainly might be accumulating and contributing to the war fatigue. There is also a less-notable exchaustion of the rainy day fund that’s also happening. So, for example, the national wellbeing fund is slowly getting eroded, and it’s unclear how much more it will take until its totally gone. While the Kremlin does have the resources right now, as we have discussed, due to variable energy dynamic in the long term, especially if there is a shock…let’s imagine something happens and the oil prices dramatically fall. This is where there will be a lot of problems for the Kremlin all of a sudden, because they just don’t any longer have these resources that they accumulated. This is partly because of the sanctions, for example the freezing of the Central Bank of Russia reserves. They do contribute, because now Russia has no resources to maintain the ruble, and it keeps flucuturing to the extent that they can maintain they have to use the resources they are not accumulating…so it’s not ideal. Essentially, if there is an economic shock, it will be a problem, and it might create the chain of unforseeable events which will be problematic for the regime. Then of course, there’s labor deficit. There is unprecedented, low, low levels of unemployment, and that contributes to the limitation and furtuer overheats the economy. Last but not the least, this also created this…uh…perhaps a war economy. It’s not a really militarized economy in the Soviet sense, but it does…the economy really runs to a large extent on the military expenses, and this creates this trap for the Kremlin that it really can’t stop the war even if they wanted to, beause then there’s not any other kind of factor that will create the GDP growth, that will create this push for the economy, so essentially they trap themselves in this situation which potentially can skyrocket. None of these factors as we have discussed is catastrophic at the moment, bu tthey do have this quality of accumulating and, uh, say in Argentina, we’ve seen a decade of inflation which was really problematic for in the long term for the governments. So it does tend overall to accumulate and create problems. Having said that, probably we should not be basing our hopes on just this analysis and I want to echo Michael Kofman in his call for the importance of rethinking and actually coming up with a long-term strategy in the West. One of the problems why we’re having all of these ocnversations is the lack of long-term strategy on the side of the US and European administrations, like: how do they really see this war going? What is it that they’re trying to achieve for Ukraine? Once they have that clear goal in mind, maybe they can contribute certain resources given how important this war is. Max, I have a summing up statement for you. It’s a paraphrase of the Austrian humorist Carl Krauss, and you know you could take his words and rework thema nd say that the situation in the west is hopeless but not serious and the situation in Ukraine is serious but not hopeless, and I think that may sum up our conversation today. So if the West can become more-serious, it renders the situation in Ukraine less-hopeless.
Bergman: I think that’s a great short summary. I think that’s a really great way to encapsulated it, that in some ways continuing to support Ukraine is not…it’s not causing our price of eggs to increase. It’s having very little, almost no impact on the United States. In fact, almost all of it is going into US defense production and expanding US defense production which supports American jobs and actually expands our defense industrial production which is seen as one of the major things that have happened. Well, we’re out of time, so we’re going to have to wrap it up.
Thank you, I’m looking forward to the continuation.