How Ukraine Put Russia on the Backfoot

**Ryan Evans** (0:10)
You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense and foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans and I'm the founder of War on the Rocks. In this episode, I speak with Mike Kofman and Dara Massicot, both of the Carnegie Endowment on the Ukrainian battlefield. Specifically, we dig into how and why things are looking much better for Ukraine, or at least better than they have been for a while. This was recorded right before the brouhaha over Zelensky firing, a very popular defense minister. But the good news is we have some free content on that at warontherocks.com. It's a free edition of the Ukraine Compass, one of our members only newsletters, which I think you'll enjoy. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Booz Allen, an advanced technology company that builds commercial-grade products and solutions for America's most critical defense, civil and national security priorities. They're also doing some exciting work in Europe. And I speak with Joe Bice, one of that company's most talented executives on exactly that, in a short conversation in the middle of this episode. You can learn more at warontherocks.com/boozallen.
That's B-O-O-Z-A-L-L-E-N.
How would you describe the phase of the war that we're at?

**Mike Kofman** (1:16)
I think you can always debate whether or not this is an inflection point or a true turning point. To me, we are seeing a turning point. Ukraine is in the best position that's been in the war since summer of 2023

**Ryan Evans** (1:27)
Before their offensive.

**Mike Kofman** (1:29)
Yes, before the failed summer 2023 offensive. The question is, has it established a lasting advantage or is this a temporary one pre-creating a window of opportunity? It's clear that the Russian offensive has floundered for a whole host of reasons. We've discussed them before on the podcast. Russians have had consecutive months of essentially making no gains or actually losing territorial control. Ukraine has the initiative due to the successful campaign, targeting Russian logistics, operational death, isolating Crimea, and Russia's focused primarily on the bombardment campaign in some ways to compensate for the lack of progress of their forces on the ground. The big question is, is Ukraine setting the conditions for some kind of limited offensive operations? Is it simply trying to get leverage for negotiations that they're hoping to have ahead of the winter? Because they too are quite vulnerable. You see Ukraine is largely out of ammunition for Western-provided missile defense. And when winter comes, there's a concern that the Russian hand might strengthen once again.

**Ryan Evans** (2:27)
Could you talk about the sources of some of the Ukrainian operational success and momentum that we're seeing now?

**Dara Massicot** (2:34)
Yeah, I think if we look at the Crimea operation in particular, I think we can say that there's been a sequencing and real thought to this campaign over the past six plus months. So, there has been an attempt to first downgrade Russian air defenses in occupied Ukraine near the land bridge to Crimea. We are seeing a sustained priority against targeting logistics along that land route. Russia has had to compensate by moving counter drone teams like Rubicon and other elements like that from other parts of the front to cover down on that, which opens up opportunities for Ukraine elsewhere. We are also seeing a strike campaign on the electrical grid in Crimea.
We are now seeing Russians trying to leave because there are gas shortages, food shortages, and people are really worried. I think we can say that Ukraine is really imposing different kinds of dilemmas on Moscow, mostly through the drone and growing intermediate strike campaigns that we're seeing Crimea, homeland Russia, all of that.

**Ryan Evans** (3:30)
This campaign against Russian energy infrastructure has been particularly impressive in Crimea and in actual Russia proper. And some of this relates to what we discussed, Mike, in terms of Ukraine filling the doughnut hole before they have this short-range drone capabilities, FPVs, on and around the front and then this long-range stuff. A lot of this energy infrastructure is not very far from the Ukrainian border that they've been striking. Some of it is further in the long range, but it's pretty remarkable what they've been able to accomplish.

**Mike Kofman** (3:59)
Yeah, I think that part of the campaign is essentially the cumulative effect. They've been after Russian energy infrastructure and fuel refining capacity for two years now. Summer months, you get peak usage in Russia, and they have pretty significant constraints in supply. And this year, Ukraine has been able to generate a genuine fuel crisis, what they've been trying to do for the last two years, because they finally have the number of drones, they have the sortie rates, they have the range to hit most of the refineries for several thousand kilometers, and they've done enough cumulative damage to create a lot of strain on the system.