Welcome to the President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States.

I'm Jim Lindsay, Director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This week's topic is Ukraine's counteroffensive.

With me to discuss the current state of the war in Ukraine is Max Boot.

Max is the Gene J. Kirkpatrick's Senior Fellow in National Security Studies here at the

Council. He is also a columnist for the Washington Post.

Max has written prolifically on military affairs.

His most recent book, The Road Not Taken, Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam,

was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in biography.

Max, thanks for joining me. Great to be here, Jim.

Let's get right to it, Max. The war in Ukraine. The Ukrainian military launched a much-anticipated counter-offensive earlier in the summer. Where do things stand today?

That's a good question, which is very hard to

answer because the Ukrainians have certainly made some progress over the past three months,

but they have not achieved a massive breakthrough. They have achieved some minor breakthroughs,

and in the past month or so, they have broken through the Russian front lines in Zaporizia province in southern Ukraine, which is a significant development.

But the counteroffensive, I guess the way to put it is that it is proceeding, it is progressing, but it is proceeding and progressing fairly slowly, which is no fault of the Ukrainians, because they are facing,

you know, very entrenched Russian defenses with very heavy minefields, artillery, and, you know,

Russian attack helicopters and drones. And the Ukrainians lack the kind of air cover that U.S. troops have taken for granted since World War II.

I mean, the U.S. military would never advance in this kind of offensive against entrenched enemy positions without air cover.

And you saw how important the U.S. Air Force was in enabling the Army and marine advances during the 1991 Gulf War and during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Ukrainians don't have that.

So they're really forced to advance. I mean, they have drones, but they certainly don't have, you know, control of the air the way the U.S. has done.

And so they've had to take this pretty slowly. And what they found was

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