This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 22nd, 2004.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Does Ukraine's move into Russian territory signal something new about the war and importantly

should it spur a change in US policy toward Ukraine?

Katers Doug Bandow comments.

The Ukrainian attack. and how

the Ukrainian attack that's gone over into the corsk region of Russia is quite dramatic.

First it shows the fighting spirit of the Ukrainian people without Without questions, after two and a half years of war,

almost three years of war,

you know, they're still willing to fight

and they give it very hard to the Russians.

I think in many ways you could look at it either as a stroke of inspiration or as an act of desperation.

Frankly, you know, they've embarrassed Putin very well, it's going to hurt his standing not only internationally but at home.

And it certainly is going to have some impact, I suspect, on Russian morale.

It's shown again that the Russians militarily tend to be slow, tend not to be you're terribly imaginative,

but there's a real danger in this. That is from the Ukrainian standpoint,

they are very unlikely to be able to hold that territory. They don't have enough manpower.

They are on the defense in the Don Bass and they are very much in danger of having used some of their best forces for this

adventure that will be chewed up and aren't available for defense elsewhere.

And the Russians, as far as we can tell, they've moved some forces into help contain the attack,

but they haven't taken the most important forces away from their ongoing attacks.

So in many ways, this could be, I mean, people have, you'll compared it to the Battle of the Bulge.

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