Ukrainian Progress: A Breach or a Breakthrough of Russian Lines?

War on the Rocks

News, Politics

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 September 2023

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Nick Danforth sat down with Mike Kofman to discuss the state of the Ukrainain offensive three months in, as well as the challenges of assessing it. Mike also explained why he, as an analyst, was particularly pleased to have Yevgeny Prigozhin out of the picture. The two discussed Mike's recent co-authored piece with Rob Lee, "Perseverance and Adaptation: Ukraine's Counteroffensive at Three Months," and how the findings were similar to Jack Watling and Nick Reynold's latest report for RUSI, Stormbreak: Fighting Through Russian Defences in Ukraine’s 2023 Offensive.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the War on the Rocks podcast covering strategy, defense, and foreign affairs.
0:17.0	I'm Nicholas Stanforth, editor at War on the Rocks, and I'm here with Mike Kaufman in his beautifully decorated office in downtown DC
0:24.8	to discuss the state of Ukraine's offensive. Mike, where do things stand?
0:29.8	Thanks, Nick, Nick, I'm, and thanks for hosting us. Nick is joking, my office actually doesn't have any decorations at all.
0:35.8	I just recently moved into it this past month.
0:39.2	But regarding the offensive, I think if we look around the past two weeks or so, the largely stabilized there. The Russian forces have not made significant progress there or anywhere around
0:57.3	Cremina. I think Ukrainian forces are still trying to take the rest of Klishivka south of Buckmoot.
1:05.0	That fight has dragged on now to be on us probably for a couple months and
1:10.0	progress around Buckmuth has been slow.
1:14.0	If we look further south to the two kind of axes of the offensive that's been progressing in the operation and southern Deneabsk.
1:28.0	So the Villekena Vaseulka axis had been largely dormant for for some time and a lot of the units there appear to be maybe in some state of recovery or refit, but more recently Ukrainian forces have started to pressure the Russian military there again,
1:45.0	launching an attack.
1:48.0	It doesn't seem to be necessarily a very significant effort, but nonetheless you see that they're trying to
1:54.2	pressure the Russian military still on that axis.
1:57.8	And that takes us of course to the main axis which I'm sure is what people want to hear
2:01.6	about. Does the push from a rehab and the recent successes the Ukrainian force have had after capturing Tene and pushing and expanding the salient towards Verboe and southeast of Verboe to some extent
2:18.5	may be flanking the next town and that chain.
2:21.6	What's been happening is Ukrainian forces have been
2:24.5	fighting their way through pretty extensive defensive
2:28.9	network of tunnels and fortifications that were outside of our butina as well, sort of east of it.
2:36.0	The first line of defense were Russian forces shows to concentrate their defense was actually
2:40.5	quite robust.
	...

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