Well, ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention?

Tell you again!

Thanks, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media.

Excited about this is sort of like Schrodinger's guest. It's an inter-positional problem.

He's not a first-time guest, but he's a first-time with me because, I don't know, six months a year ago, I asked Klond to sub for me in Klond Kitchen.

He had Luke Coffee on to talk about Ukraine stuff, and I thought it was a great podcast, and I had to give it a respectable period of time before I had him back on to talk to me.

So I think that time has passed. There's lots of stuff going on with Ukraine.

Luke Coffee is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He's a bit long-specialized on transatlantic, I think the technical term in the literature is stuff, and also various issues around NATO, and Eurasia, and security, and Luke, welcome to the Remnant. Back him back to the Remnant.

Thanks, John. It's great to be back. It's great to be here with you one-on-one. For the first time, I had a great time with Klond, and I look forward to our discussion today together.

So, big picture you and I are in violent agreement about the importance of Ukraine, helping Ukraine, resisting Russia.

When I've heard you talk about this stuff both on here and also on the London Telegraphs podcast, which I'm a big booster of, I think rightly for public diplomacy sake, I don't know what the right word for it would be, emphasize the national security interest of the United States in all of this, where I'm still a bit more of a moralist.

I just think countries that have a policy of abducting children and raping people who, and trying to crush nations trying to build up a democracy, need to be resisted.

But I don't discount or disagree with any of the national security arguments either. So, with that level setting, where do you see the situation now?

We're going to talk about domestic stuff in a little bit, but where do you see the situation now? On the battlefield, in Europe, in Kiev, how is it all going? What do you think the counteroffensive is?

This is your opening briefing, as it were.

Thanks. Well, of course, it's well-known at this point that Ukraine is somewhat saying in the middle, I actually don't think we know exactly where they are in the process of their 2023 counteroffensive.

I think we've probably, we've all watched too many Hollywood movies over the years where we think, you know, a counteroffensive has this start point where, you know, there's a young officer firing a pistol into the air and then the tanks move forward and then the fighting commences.

I think these, the sort of warfare, this industrial-level state-on-state conflict, is such that it's impossible to know exactly or to identify exactly when a counteroffensive starts or win it in.

So I think there are so many moving pieces. You have a front line that is about, if you stretched it out, 900 miles long. That is the straight line distance from Washington, D.C. to just outside Kansas City, Missouri.

You have hundreds of thousands of soldiers on each side of this front line and you have tens of thousands of pieces of equipment.

So it's a very complex situation. So there's no doubt that Ukraine is in the process of their counteroffensive. There's been a lot of reporting about expectations.

Not having been met, I think these people who believe us are hopelessly naive about what to expect when it comes to the speed of this counteroffensive.

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