You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense and Foreign Affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans of War in the Rocks, of course.

I'm sitting here again with Michael Kaufman to help us understand Russia's war on Ukraine, which is now almost two weeks old, not quite.

Many of you may have listened to our last episode where we talked about the first few days.

Russia's weird planning assumptions and the way that that unfolded in the initial chaotic days of Russia's offensive.

Mike, what's the state of play? Where do things stand right now between Ukrainian and Russian forces?

Ron, thanks for having me back on the podcast.

Yeah, the state of play is not that easy to assess,

obviously the wars gone on at a pretty high pace of operations and not only do you have

conflicting claims but it's not that easy to tell what's happening day to day on

the ground. I spent a lot of my time day to day

just trying to follow it. Russian forces have made gains but they've been

frustrated and a lot of the objectives they tried to pursue this is going to be no quick victory for them. They have a lot of

issues with logistics and with force organization of force employment. Ukrainian force amounted a pretty

robust resistance and are holding but in areas like several major cities have

been encircled or a near encircled. In the south Russian forces have had pretty large

breakouts. In the north they're rather stalled and you've seen

probably in the last three days or so a real shift in the Russian use of air power power much more significant use of the Russian were called

Air Space Forces but that's also led to a number of losses on their end both helicopters

and aircraft.

Seen much greater use of firepower, as I suspected early on the week, that

Russian forces would attempt to reorganize this failed bid at quick regime change into a combined arms operation and you would

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