Frederick W. Kagan on Ukraine: Where Things Stand and Where Might They Be Going

Conversations with Bill Kristol

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🗓️ 1 May 2024

⏱️ 68 minutes

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Summary

Where do things stand in Ukraine? How will the recently-passed aid package help Ukraine on the battlefield? How does the war in Ukraine relate to rising threats from adversaries around the globe? To discuss these questions we are joined again by Fred Kagan, director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. Kagan explains that Ukraine continues to face serious difficulties, in part because of a critical shortage of weapons as a result of the delay in US support. Yet the recently-passed aid package should bolster defenses against Russia’s anticipated assault this summer, and potentially help Ukraine to make gains in a counteroffensive early next year. Reflecting on the war and the world situation more broadly, Kagan points to the rising alliances among Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea as a comprehensive threat to the free world. As he puts it: “These countries disagree about a lot of things. They don’t share a common ideology. But they do share a common enemy: us.… We have to recognize [it] is an entente that aims to take us down, and we have to be resisting every part of it.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined again.
0:19.1	Amazingly, I looked it up for the fifth time on since the war in Ukraine began by
0:24.8	Fred Kagan who's been an invaluable guide to understanding the war as has gone
0:28.8	through its different phases. Fred is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, runs its critical
0:34.2	threats project, and is a major contributor to the Institute for the Study of War,
0:39.0	ISW's daily updates on the situation in Ukraine which are must reading and I'm sure all of you
0:46.4	are reading already but you can read them for free by just subscribing to ISW.
0:49.9	So Fred Kagan, thanks for joining me again.
0:52.8	It's great to meet back with you, Bill.
0:54.6	We last spoke in September.
0:55.8	We were, I think, hopeful that the aid package would move soon.
0:59.4	And we had a, so you had an analysis of the war that slightly wasn't dependent on that, but assume that that might happen.
1:07.5	It didn't happen, and now it's finally happened.
1:10.2	Where do we stand?
1:11.3	How much for price have we paid of the Ukrainians paid for not having the aid they could have had for the last five, six months?
1:18.0	But how does it, how does the war stand on the ground?
1:22.0	So the Russians... How does the war stand on the ground?
1:23.0	So the Russians began their own offensive operations
1:30.0	as the Ukrainian counter-offensive wound down in the fall. And as the Ukrainian counter-offensive wound down in the fall.
1:34.0	And as the likelihood of renewed USAID dropped,
1:39.9	the Russians began really leaning into their offensive operations because they saw an opportunity.
1:45.9	It's not clear to me if the Kremlin decided that it actually had broken our will or that certainly Putin thought that he might have and I think that
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