You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense and Foreign Affairs. My name is Ryan Evans.

I'm sitting here again with Michael Kaufman, head of the Rush team at CNA.

Thanks again for coming on the show, Mike.

Thanks for on me going to be back.

So we haven't done one of these for I guess at least a couple weeks.

Could you update our listeners on the state of play of the conflict?

How does the battlefield look?

It shifted quite a bit in the last couple of years. the state of play of the conflict. How does the battlefield look?

It shifted quite a bit in the last couple of weeks.

If the original Russian plan was to conduct a larger development and to try to both pursue an axis of advance from Isum to try to

envelop sort of slavans and chromatorsk on the northern side of the emboss. And further east Sierra Dania. a and Ukrainian resistance was quite stiff around the zoom axis.

So they have shifted forces much further east.

Now started to focus on savor Danesas which is actually is in law and I suspect that

weeks ago Gerasimo's visit the chief of general staff to assume was about shifting the focus of the operation

and essentially restructuring because they weren't meeting with much success.

I want to ask you about that but I should say to our listeners this is one of those times

where you might want to be looking at a map of Ukraine right now to follow along but why would I mean first off I was sort of surprised that Grasimov still hasn't had a job after how badly the war has gone and given his you know role as most senior officer in the

Russian military why was he deployed forward to Ukraine and then reportedly wounded like

why why would you deploy your senior most officer

to the battlefield like that?

First, I don't think he was actually wounded,

but second, that is very much Russian military culture.

...