Welcome back to The Bunker, News Without the Nonsense, five days a week. I'm Alex von Tundselman.

Now, Russia's invasion of Ukraine began in chaos, poor intelligence and broken logistics. Vladimir Putin may have

believed he had an assured victory, but that quickly morphed into a slow grinding war with

no end in sight. Russia didn't win, but it also hasn't lost, at least not yet. How did a force

that fumbled the start so badly become a war

machine that continues to rumble on? Today on the bunker, I'm joined by Dara Massico,

senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

to unpack how the Kremlin adapted, how Moscow could weaponize these lessons in its next

military campaign, and what Europe needs to do to prepare. Dara, welcome to the bunker.

Thanks so much for having me. Well, it's lovely to speak to you. Now, let's start with a big ticket item.

What's the biggest misconception the West still holds about the invasion of Ukraine?

I think that there is a lot of anchoring that people are holding on to from the initial

two or three months of the war when it was pretty catastrophic for the Russian army.

The war that they planned for and thought that they would get, namely that the Ukrainians would not resist them.

They didn't get it. They took a lot of damage from that time.

And I think there has been a lot of anchoring to that period where the Russian military is Soviet.

It can't learn. It's just using brute force tactics. And to some extent, that's true. But there

is an entirely almost hidden story of how they've been learning for the past two or three years

and working to make a lot of changes within their force. And that sounds like a thing that we

shouldn't underestimate when we assess how things are going.

Can you take us back to the start of the war? What happened at the beginning of 2022 when the

invasion first happened? Sure. So the Russians made, in my view, quite a strong deviation from how

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