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All right gentlemen

Could I please have your attention?

Greetings dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg host of the Remnant Podcasts brought to you by the dispatch and dispatch media. Very excited about today's guest and also I was just telling them exceedingly guilty feeling because it's kind of outrageous that I haven't had them on here.

Earlier given his the high regard and esteem with which he is held at the American Enterprise Institute.

I am talking about Fred Kagan who is the director of the Critical Threats project at AI and the sort of all around military and defense guru in my corner of the world.

It's a good week to have it. Well, it's a bad week to have them on, but that's why we have them on Fred welcome to the Remnant.

Thank you, Jonah. Thanks so much for having me.

So I don't even know where to start because this is as the as the townman says this is a facock the time.

But why don't we sort of I feel like I'm less concerned about Taiwan right now because that's the that's the looming problem and the the the

critical threat problem right now is is in fact Ukraine. So why don't we just start with your broad assessment of how things are going and if you want to fold in the leak issue.

I'll probably have follow up questions about that but take it where you want to go on that.

So the basic situation in a nutshell is the Russians launched a big offensive over the winter, which almost everybody missed because it went absolutely nowhere.

And this was having called up several hundred thousand reservists. They launched attacks all along the line in NewHansk and that may have set a record speaking as a military historian that may have been the first time that a major prepared mechanized offensive did not penetrate the first prepared defensive positions of the adversary.

That's not a record you want to hold, but that's the record the Russians held.

The battle of Bachmout was not the winter offensive. The battle of Bachmout was the secondary effort by the Wagner group and they that has been grinding forward and I do mean grinding in a way that has chewed up the Wagner group in pursuit of and again that is absolutely not operationally strategically significant.

And that is that is ongoing pretty much all of the other Russian offensive have stopped or stalled and defeated and now pretty much everybody is waiting for the Ukrainian counter offensive, which I think will likely start some time in the next few weeks at a location and time to be determined.

So I'm happy to talk more about prospects for that and so forth, but that's basically where the war stands right now.

Let's talk about Bachmout for two seconds because on the one hand, and I'm a fanatical listener to the telegraphs Ukraine podcast.

I've been following on a daily basis the Bachmout stuff and I read all of our stuff and it seems like the zeitgeist has kind of changed on this.

Whereas in the beginning when it was the quote unquote meat grinder and it was just the casualty ratio was so lopsided for the Russians that it was worth defending this strategically and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but the zeitgeist was was that the book, Bachmout was not strategically valuable, but the Russians were so desperate for even a symbolic victory somewhere, particularly a progogean the head of this person.

And so I think the first time I was in the private military group, the Wagner group, that the Ukrainians were perfectly happy to have them just march into the meat grinder for as long as they wanted.

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