You are listening to the War on the Rock's podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans and I'm sitting here again with Michael Kaufman to talk about the stunning

advances in the Ukrainian counter-offensive, especially around Kharkiv.

Mike, thanks for joining.

A lot of people have been bugging us on Twitter to record faster, but it's nice that we could

record from Newport.

We're up here for a little conference together and I'm sure this

will come up in the proceedings over the next couple of days but I know a lot of people

are waiting to hear your interpretation of the last several days last week or so.

Yeah, it's great to be back here with you recording this.

And I'm sorry to everybody who had the weight and I apologize.

So Mike, last time we spoke we focused mostly on the Kirsun area and I

actually want to talk more about that later but it seems like Ukraine saw Russia shifting resources, manpower especially down to the southern front and

launched this pretty impressive offensive against the areas surrounding Kharkiv further up north.

And this is, I should say to our listeners, get one of the maps out there.

A lot of people are making these maps, institute for study of war.

There's a few others, just pull one up so you can

follow along with the conversation.

Right off the band talking about the relationship between these two operations I'll give you my

interpretation of it and obviously I don't know some of these things for a fact. I don't want to represent as though I somehow you know work in the Ukrainian general staff and and could divine the planning.

My impression is that these are both interrelated and concurrent offenses,

that Curzon was meant to draw Russian forces to the south and try to fix them there.

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