You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense and Foreign Affairs. My name is Ryan Evans.

I'm sitting here again with Michael Kaufman to talk about what's going on in the war in Ukraine.

Mike, what's the state of play now and let's zoom in on the east?

Well, in the past week it's clear that even though the Russian military had not been very successful in trying to conduct a

sort of double involvement and had shifted forces to the eastern part of

the offensive focused on several Danietz K and the Ch conless, they could make a successful crossing across the Seversky-Dineettes

river. A lot of people saw that in the media.

There were two battalion tactical groups that were destroyed.

Where's this river just to orient readers or not familiar,

as familiar with the geography of Ukraine is.

Right.

And listeners I should say you should be looking at a map of Ukraine

for this part of the conversation.

Right, so there's a river and it runs east to west, and it runs north of Kromatores

can save it. Then yeah, it it sort of takes a hard turn and heads

further north.

And so in many cases, offensive is more like the Seversky-Danielsk,

the Sarasota River offensive because it focuses so much around the river and

and that's where a lot of the fighting seems to be concentrated in Russian attempts to

capture territory north of it and then to make a successful

brashhead to attack for their south. Well they were not successful in that

operation but as I had mentioned before they were also attempting a breakout from Pappasna which is

...