You are listening to the War in the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and

foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans, I'm the founder of War in the

the Rocks and I'm sitting here with your friend and mine, Michael Kaufman,

to talk about the war in Ukraine. Thanks for coming back on the show.

Yeah, it's great to be doing this one again together.

So a lot of world attention has been on Israel for understandable reasons,

but the war in Ukraine, of course, drags on.

So let's start with the state of the offensive

and where you see things the state of play. Yeah so it's a good question.

Naturally a lot of attention is refocused to the Middle East but things are staying pretty dynamic in Ukraine.

So regarding Ukraine's offensive, they have been making what at best could be called a

molecule of progress, but I think a lot of the early

claims of breakthroughs in the south were premature. Things may have appeared to be

largely the way they were but there's still a speculation out there that there's more to

happen before kind of the mud season, the winter arrives later in November.

My own sense is there's probably a couple more interesting weeks to play out in this

offensive operation if you read all the information sources from the Russian

side and Russian bloggers they are quite worried about a buildup that they see opposite Herson on the Ukrainian side of the Neapura River Bank and have been trying to attack Ukraine Assembly areas, pontoon bridges and what have you and I think the reason for that is

they're concerned that the Ukrainian military is sort of saving up for

potentially one more push possibly in operation still trying to advance towards Tukmok from a rehab, and possibly

linked up with a cross-river operation, which would be very ambitious at this point and very risky, especially if the

Russian military knows that's coming.

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