You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense and foreign affairs, you know the routine if you're a regular listener.

My name is Ryan Evans, the founder of War in the Rocks, and I'm sitting here with your favorite and mine, Mike Kaufman.

Mike, thanks for joining us again on the show. Yeah, thanks for

me back. We're here to talk about Ukraine obviously. Let's start with the most

acute battle going on right now at a Di Vjevka. Of Diyvka has been a somewhat fitfall fight that's been ongoing since October.

You know, the initial big Russian push there over the fall wasn't successful.

They lost quite a bit of equipment.

I think their losses are, have crept up into 500 plus pieces of equipment at this point.

For those who are kind of curious, this is at the level of having lost almost an entire division

or something towards a combined arms army.

But while the fight stabilized towards the end of the year, I think the last time we really talked about this was around New Year's,

Russian forces have in the past week we're going to have made gains around

of DiFCA.

And so the situation around of DiFCA is, I would say, stable but stably bad and trending for the worse.

You know, it sounds that Russian forces are making incremental gains,

and I still hold to kind of my earlier judgment back on the fall

that there's a good chance of DFCA will eventually be lost.

What does it say about the manpower situation of the Russian army that Putin seems an associated

forces of course that Putin seems comfortable

throwing all these people into that meat grinder it doesn't seem like there's any

change in the Russian concept of operations it's just this very relentless willingness to accept lots of

casualties approach to war. So they tried a mechanized breakthrough back in the

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