Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined today by my friend Fred Kagan, the distinguished military historian and military analyst and strategist, director of the Critical Threats project at the American Enterprise Institute.

Supervisors, the Russia team, or the team that's covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war at the Institute for the Study of War, the excellent daily updates that everyone should subscribe to at the Institute for the Study of War if they want to, or if they don't want to, they don't want to, they should because they'll learn day-to-day what's happening in the war.

So, this is a fourth conversation overall with Fred, and our third since the war began, and I think the ones I just looked at them in April and October about every six months were making this a regular thing.

They stand up very well, and it's time for an update, so Fred, thanks for joining me.

Great to be back with you, Bill. Thank you for having me.

So, you know, where are we? What's the current situation? What's surprised you the most, I guess, since the earlier surprises, and what's the, how do we think about this war, which has been going for what year and a quarter now?

So, the world is holding its breath, waiting for the Ukrainian counteroffensive, and that's the dominant phenomenon on the battlefield.

The Russians are continuing to grind their way through the city of Buckmouth, and have been continuing also to try to take the city of Vdivka, which is near Danyac City, and which they've been trying to take since 2014.

And otherwise, the Russians have largely finally stopped most of their offensive operations elsewhere, and seem to be actually focusing on preparing for Ukrainian counteroffensive.

So, basically, I mean, to step back, so we had the original assault, obviously, repulsed kind of amazingly by the Ukrainians, then we had the war for a while, and became clear, the Russians weren't going to grout to Ukrainians, and that pretty amazing Ukrainian counteroffensive and September October.

But say a word about that, and say a word about just different fronts you hear about the South and the East, but some of us don't have this entirely in our heads.

Yeah, I'm sorry, that's good. So, right, so the Russians started with an invasion along multiple axes from the attack from Belarus and Western Russia trying to get to Kiev, that obviously failed completely, and then they withdrew.

At the same time as they were doing that, they were also attacking in the East, and driving through Luhansk province in the North East, and then driving south along the coast of the CLS off toward the top of Crimean Peninsula, and then they drove from the Crimean Peninsula north, and then found out in three different directions.

That was the initial Russian invasion, it was a bad plan, and it gave Ukrainians a lot of opportunities to push back, which they did remarkably well, and of course defeated the attack on Kiev.

After that, the Russians focused their efforts on the East and South, primarily, which turned rapidly into a focus on the East, and then they ground through most of Luhansk province,

while hanging onto gains that they had made in Harkiv, which is the province just to the west of Luhansk, and that had been their focus for most of mid-22.

Then in late summer, going into fall, the Ukrainians started counter-offensive operations. They telegraphed them in Harsom, in the south, at the mouth of the Nipro River, and got the Russians concentrated on defending there, and as the Ukrainians were working on that, they launched a lightning strike in Harkiv.

We now know that there were four Ukrainian brigades, which will matter for later part of the story, routed the Russian forces in Harkiv in a matter of days, really quite embarrassingly, in fact.

The Russians were completely surprised and unprepared, and elements of some of the best, most elite Russian tank units were there in Harkiv.

They donated something like 100 tanks to the Ukrainians in their flight, which the Ukrainians have put to good use, and the Ukrainians actually chased the Russians almost entirely out of Harkiv at that time.

Then they turned back to Harsom, and were able to push the Russians off of the west bank of the Nipro River.

Those counter-offences were very remarkable, they were significant, they were enabled by Ukrainian preparations, but also by the provision of U.S. high-mars, long-range precision rockets, which the Ukrainians used to extraordinarily good and innovative effects, especially in the south.

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