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

My name is Ryan Evans, the founder of Warren the Rocks.

It's been a while since I've sat down personally with my friend Mike Coffin, but here we are.

We're at a friend friends back porch on a

slightly sweltering Sunday afternoon in our nation's capital. Mike thanks for joining me again.

Yeah it's really good to reconnect. So we've put out a lot of episodes featuring you and your collaborators, Conrad, Franz, Rob,

and they've been really great shows.

I don't know if, for those of you who are not one the rocks members

definitely become one there's been some great ones on the Russia contingency and

which is Mike Show of course and there's where I think we're coming out with one very

soon on what it's like to do field research in Ukraine but we're

going to talk bigger picture issues here so I'd like to just zoom out the Ukrainian

offensive is ongoing of course how did we get to this kind of offensive?

How did Ukraine arrive at the sort of offensive that it's conducting?

Thanks, Ryan.

I think that it is important to trace the origins of the offensive further back through the course of this

war over the past year.

And I think it's fair to say that the objective of the offensive is for Ukrainian forces to break through to the objective of the fence of us for Ukrainian forces to break through to the sea of us off to the coast,

several Russian ground lines of communication and also be in a position to then

steadily course or putting Jeopardy, the Russian forces in Crimea.

Now this makes sense a strategic objective, but how Ukraine got here is a path that starts at the counter-offensive in Harkevin-Hirsson.

Which was last fall.

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