Assessing Ukraine's Prospects in 2025

War on the Rocks

News, Politics

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

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Summary

Mike Kofman joined Ryan for a wide-ranging conversation on the challenges faced by both Ukraine and Russia this year. They discuss losses on both sides, manpower challenges, the importance of following the discourse in Ukraine, the Russian economy, and whether the Russian pace of operations will clearly slow down. This episode is brought to you by Bedrock Knowledge.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense and Foreign Affairs.
0:14.0	My name is Ryan Evans, and I'm sitting here with Michael Kaufman of the Carnegie Endowment
0:18.1	on International Peace. Mike, thanks for joining the show. It's been a while since we've had you on. Thanks for having me back. So a lot's happened in Ukraine.
0:24.7	I think we've all been caught up in Washington on change of our government, change of president,
0:30.6	a new Congress, all that stuff. And there's lots to talk about there. But while this has all been
0:35.4	happening, there's been things happening in Ukraine. So let's talk about what's happened on the battlefield in the last four weeks or so.
0:41.8	So I think what's been happening for at least the last four to six weeks is that Russian
0:46.5	offensive operations began to visibly slow down in December. And I think we debate why that is
0:51.0	because of bad weather. For example, we know that weather-grounded aircraft,
0:58.8	and that led to a significant reduction in Glymbom's strikes. But there was a big trend from July to December where Russian forces kept increasing the rate of gain. And I start to slow down December.
1:03.4	And the question is that going to continue, meaning are we going to see a slowdown in Russian gains?
1:08.9	Are they going to pick back up now? There was some fighting in Kursk.
1:12.3	We saw North Korean troops employed around the middle of December and some pretty
1:16.1	heavy fighting with North Koreans.
1:18.4	And the way that shook out as best I can tell is that North Korean forces have taken
1:23.8	pretty significant losses to that initial 10,000 men that were deployed, but they've
1:28.9	also been making gains. They made a dent in sort of the western or left side of the Kersalian.
1:34.1	Ukrainian force had a small operation in Kursk was maybe battalion size or so, and it seemed
1:38.7	to be a pocket overall unsuccessful. Russia's taken a bit more. Yeah, there was kind of dueling
1:42.7	offensives in Kursk by both Ukraine and Russia.
1:46.1	Simultaneous. So it seemed that Russia military at least anticipated a very small
1:51.2	Ukraine offensive operation, which wasn't really an operation of just to gain better positions,
	...

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