Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined. I think for the second time, it was a few years ago, today by Fred Kagan, Senior Fellow Director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute.

An old friend and a colleague of mine who's done such important work over the years on all manners of things, military and defense related and foreign policy related, spent what year to an Afghanistan trying to help there.

The nice vacation spot you picked their friends. Yeah, it was it was interesting. Yeah, well, you look you were serving the year doing your duty for the country, and then I think really helped.

And Fred has particularly been following the war Ukraine, advising working closely with the Russia team at these children's study of war, which full disclosure, I'm on the board of an honor to play a tiny role there. So Fred, no one better to talk to them. Fred Kagan about what's going on in the war in Ukraine, how to think about it, how to understand it, what might happen and the like. So Fred, thanks for joining me. Good to be back with your bill.

Okay, Fred, so we're just we're talking just to orient people at the end of April, April 26, but just over two months into the war.

Where do things stand? What should we let's we're all trying to follow this, but it's confusing and complicated and you read a lot of different things with what's the basic outline as an analyst of war of where we are.

Well, on February 24, the Russians launched a massive invasion to seize occupy and control all of Ukraine. It was one of the most poorly designed and executed major military operations, I can recall.

A major power actually initiating failed dismally, Ukrainians defeated the Russian attempt to circle and seize Kiev and won the Battle of Kiev.

The Russians decided to cut their losses rather than be pushed out because the Ukrainians were otherwise, I think, going to actually drive them out of the country around Kiev.

And so Putin ordered a reorientation of the Russian effort to seizing or to what he claims with the new objective is to seize the full boundaries of Danyetsk and Nevansk provinces in the east, which the proxy republics that he invented and then caused to clear their independence, which he then recognized in a customarily farcical manner.

They claim that their territory extends to those provincial boundaries, and so he's ordered his forces ostensibly to seize the portions of Danyetsk and Nevansk provinces that they didn't already have occupied some of it in 2014.

They've occupied about half of Danyetsk since 2014, and they invaded and have occupied now a lot of the Haas.

But that was candidly always BS. The Russian objectives go beyond that, and they involve holding the territory that they've taken all along the coast of the Sea of Us off down to Crimea and out to the city of Kerson.

And they also continue to occupy territory around Harkeev, and it's very clear that they don't have any intention of giving that up.

But the Russians have refocused their battered military on trying to take the parts of Danyetsk and Nevansk they don't control and are in the midst of the next phase of their offensive operation to do that.

They're struggling with this operation because the flaws in the Russian military that led them to failure around Kiev are endemic and not really fixable in a short period of time, and because Ukrainians continue to fight heroically and skillfully.

The offensive right now is grinding along, but it's grinding slowly, and it's not really clear what kind of progress it's going to be able to make or at what speed.

You can talk about what's going on in medieval if you want to, but effectively the Russians have seized for all intents and purposes, the city that they've been trying to take since 2014.

And they finally have taken it at a horrific cost and largely by destroying it, but they have not been able to take the us off stall massive industrial plant that the Ukrainians are Ukrainian hero defenders are still holding.

Supposedly given the order not to try to take, although it's not clear that he did or that that order is being obeyed, so their fighting is still going on there.

And so, I mean, afterwards everything is understood to have been inevitable and predictable, but was it, I mean, one reason people like you, I think thought Putin was unlikely perhaps to go in and the way he did was just trying to conquer or destroy the country, remove the government and the big objectives as opposed to the smaller ones was that you thought it would not work.

So in this respect, you were certainly right, but I mean, how much of it was a close run thing if, if, you know, if we had persuaded Zelensky to paddock and leave key for the second and the third day, I mean, could have gone in a different direction.

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