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Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I am Ben Parker, Bulwark Senior Editor, sitting in for the vacationing Charlie Sykes.

And I am very excited to introduce our special guest, Joining us from the beach in Australia, General Mick Ryan, former head of the Australian Defense College, author, sub-stack writer, scholar of Warfare and a very keen observer of the ongoing war in Ukraine.

General Ryan, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks, Penoch, quite to be with you.

I want to talk about your forthcoming book at the end. I want to start off talking about your broad view of the war in Ukraine right now.

What is the image that everyone should have of the way things are going at this moment from what you can tell?

I think at the moment we are at a transition point. We have had 10 months of war in which the Russian army has not performed very well. They have largely failed on the battlefield after their initial gains.

But over the last couple of months they have consolidated. They have a new unified commander that began a mobilisation of people and industry that come.

They will emerge from the winter a different organisation, one that has learnt maybe not as much as the Ukrainians have, but learnt from experiences this year.

And they remain a very dangerous entity. The Ukrainians on the other hand after 10 months have seized the initiative in this war at every level.

They have demonstrated not only can they defend well, but they can go on the offensive on a couple of occasions, quite stunningly around Kharky, but also in other areas including Kerson.

So they have momentum. They will not want to lose that momentum over winter. And I think we could probably expect over the winter if anyone was going to undertake offensive even at small scale. It's more likely to be the Ukrainians than the Russians finally.

At the political level, I think we still see pretty good unity in the West in supporting Ukraine. I think there's probably some interesting and a unnecessary chatter about whether Crimea is part of it or not. It is.

But overall, I think the strategic patience by European and American public and their governments has surprised Putin. And he certainly is not able to run out the clock that he'd like to at least at this point of the war.

Yeah, I'm really interested by this topic of adaptation. It's been said that war in general is a competition of adaptation. And we saw how nimble and a droid the Ukrainians were early on.

You've mentioned a couple of the ways that Russia is adapting to its early failures, the mobilization, the appointment of a unified commander rather than a whole bunch of different officers trying to run little bits of the war.

My question is, what do you look at to determine what are the inputs of this adaptation versus what are the outputs? So we can see that Russia is putting more into the war in terms of manpower, in terms of their mouthballed old tanks and things like that, in terms of changing their command structure.

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