You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans and I'm sitting again here with Michael Kaufman, head of the Russia team over

at CNA.

Thanks again, Mike, for popping in on the show.

Thanks for having me back.

So it's been a little over two weeks, I think maybe even almost three weeks since our last

episode, and what has really happened on the battlefield since we last spoke?

The first blush and may seem like not a lot,

besides a string of successful strikes by Hymars against Russian ammunition dumps

and various command and control points,

which we can talk about a bit later.

But I think what's taking place in the battlefield

is that Russian forces had expectedly pulled up to the next Ukrainian defensive line outside

Savans, both from the Isume direction and from territory they recently captured and have just been conducting probing attacks against the defensive line running from Severest to Bachmut.

They haven't made much progress there, but they don't necessarily seem to be attacking very much in force.

I think there been a string of dynamic fights in the south, particularly a series of

positional advances by Ukrainian forces and Kyrerson, west of the river.

And Ukraine has been conducting a host of strikes that clearly have, I think,

diminished the flow of ammunition supply to Russian artillery and will

force the Russian military to try to reorganize to the extent they can, although it's obviously

debatable how much inefficiency they're willing to accept,

but they're going to have to be operating moving forward under the persistent threat of, you know,

...