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Hi and welcome back to Foreign Office. I'm Michael Weiss, Director of Special Investigations at the Free Russia Foundation and Senior Correspondent at Yahoo News.

This week, I'm very pleased to announce that we are joined by a friend of mine.

And I think one of the finest diplomats I've ever talked to about not just Ukraine, but European security.

He is Ambassador Kaimo Kusk. He is the Estonian Ambassador to Ukraine. For two more weeks, which unfortunately Ukraine's loss is going to be Lithuania's gain because he's going to become Estonia's Ambassador to Vilnius.

Where, as of tomorrow, I'm recording this on July 10th, there's a huge NATO summit taking place at which a host of issues will be discussed, including Sweden's somewhat stalled membership to the Alliance, but not least of all, also Ukraine's prospect for eventually joining NATO.

And so I thought who better to have on than the forthcoming Estonian Ambassador to Lithuania.

We're going to talk about a host of issues, but the first thing Kaimo, thank you for joining us. I know you're joining us from Tallinn before returning to Kiev for the final fortnight of your posting.

You and I have talked for, well, I mean, a few years now, but we began talking very intensively, I think in January of last year in the lead up to the war.

And you are one of the few people, at least among Western statesmen and officials, I queried at the time, who was actually quite optimistic and bullish on Ukraine's prospect for resistance.

And you got into sort of the granular level of everything from how Russia would fly sorties using fixed wing, but also rotary wing aircraft and how they would fly low, allowing the Ukrainians to pick them off with surface air missile systems and man pads, things that had not really been incorporated all that well into much of the Western analytic communities thinking about how Ukraine might be able to fend off a conquest of Kiev.

I rate your judgment very, very highly. And right now, what I'm most keen to hear from you is, if you can give us a sort of tour the horizon of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, we're in one of these cyclical states where the Western press is saying that this thing is either a failure, or it's not going so swimmingly, and it's certainly not going as quickly as everyone.

I guess Pentagon would have liked it too. It has ground to a halt. It has, quote, stalled. Give us the lay of the land here and what you from your perch, I mean, typically in Kiev, understand that perhaps, you know, the average reader of the New York Times may not about what Ukraine is trying to do.

First, thank you, Michael, for such an introduction. I'm humbled. Hello to everybody. And yeah, I'm currently in Tallinn for this week, returning to Kiev next week for the final two weeks in my rotation there.

Yeah, well, counteroffensive. It's progressing, not with speed, everybody hopes, Ukrainians included, but I think that's a smart way they are doing it.

And while they're doing it step by step, half a kilometer per day, someday maybe no geographical gain, but the next day, another kilometer or a mile, is that they need to save their soldiers' lives.

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