You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs.

My name is Nicholas Danforth and I'm here with Mike Kaufman, the director of the Russia Studies

program at CNA.

Thanks for having me back and Thanks for hosting this time around while Ryan's gone travel.

Good to be here as always.

Just start off.

What's going on with the Russian offensive?

Is it, are we seeing it now? Is it still, are we still waiting for it?

The short answer is yes. We are seeing it now. In fact, I think we've seen it for over three weeks now.

I think there's been a lot of confusion as to what the offensive is at scope and it's been a lot of media reporting suggesting that there's anticipation of you know some other major spring Russian offensive and my belief is that that's not true

Actually the Russian offensive has been in progress for several weeks now it really began with a Russian attack at

Bulguodar in a southern part of the nizk

this offensive has roughly around five axis of advance right now, all generally scoped around the Don Bas, and the main areas where you can see it are Vouladar, Marinka, Avdevka, up at Bachmut,

where the fighting's been for a while,

Bilahorovka, which is not far from

Listen Schonsk, I kind of see that as an associate access, and then further up north in Luhansk,

a Russian counterattack that's been in progress for several weeks at Kremina, trying to push

Ukraine Force away from Kremina, and it looks like more minor action a bit north of that, Kupiansk.

So maybe five, six axes, depending on how you look at it.

The way I would reconcile the different views out there

is that at this stage, the Russian military has already deployed

many of the mobilised personnel, has raised its manning tables across the force using them, and much of the rest of the force that is deployed is not an additional secondary army.

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