Into the Third Week: Will Russian Forces Need to Pause?

War on the Rocks

News, Politics

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2022

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Michael Kofman joins Ryan for the third week in a row to discuss the ongoing war in Ukraine. He breaks down the state-of-play on three fronts — southern, eastern, and northern — as well as the air war. When will Russian forces become exhausted and require a pause? How does this relate to negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow? How should we understand the risks of war under the nuclear shadow and under what scenarios might Putin turn to his nuclear arsenal? Kofman tackles these questions and more.

Transcript

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0:16.4	You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense and Foreign Affairs. My name is Ryan Evans of War on the Rocks, of course.
0:19.2	I'm sitting here again with Michael Kaufman to talk about the war in Ukraine. We are into the third week. We're about two and a half weeks in. Where do we stand now?
0:28.0	Well, I think it's probably a tale of different things happening along three fronts and it's a case of Russia trying to get its act together
0:41.6	advancing much more slowly and cautiously now trying to really work out a lot of
0:45.4	logistical issues and a lot of the forced employment issues how they actually
0:48.8	operate and move around and Ukraine of course also trying to push back trying to counterattack where they can, but leveraging urban terrain, trying to suck in Russian forces and avoiding the sort of larger combined arms fights which
1:04.5	could deplete them what you basically see on the whole and that's an imperfect
1:09.4	picture because what's happening sort of in the north is different than what's happening in the south or maybe the east.
1:16.0	But you see Russia steadily still making advances at a much, much slower pace,
1:21.0	but more methodically, more consistently, and now you see the greater
1:25.5	employment of capabilities that really were missing in the first week or two of the war.
1:31.6	So for example, remotely operated systems drones, you now see all sorts of
1:36.4	drone platforms being used for ISR, maybe to direct certain types of guide or artillery
1:41.9	strikes, you see sight cropping up of more use of
1:46.8	electronic warfare systems, still very scattered. You see much better
1:51.6	force organization employment on the Russian side. You see much better force organization employment on the Russian side.
1:54.4	You see greater actual movement as part of sort of larger battalion tactical groups,
2:00.4	but generally a methodical approach to trying to secure talents, trying to clear them, and being better.
2:06.5	There's still huge problems in terms of how they employ their forces tactically, right?
2:11.5	They have issues with fundamentals, but there's no longer these
2:16.9	cases of smaller units detachments running around, getting ambushed, and you see a more methodical approach to advances because before it felt like
2:27.6	They were working with some
	...

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