Episode Notes:

On this episode of the Russia Contingency, Mike is joined by Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. Mike and Dara spoke about the current state of the Russian military, the legacy of the Chief of the Russian General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, the recent drone attack in Moscow, and the need to set expectations about Ukraine's military offensive.

The Russia Contingency is a bi-weekly podcast featuring in-depth analysis of Russia's military power and the war in Ukraine.

 

Episode Transcript

Michael Kofman: Welcome back to another episode of The Russia Contingency. I'm Michael Kofman. Today, I have a familiar guest. This is a longtime colleague and friend of mine. She's been on the program before. Her name's Dara Massicot. Dara is a longtime researcher of the Russian military. She works for RAND, she follows the Russian armed forces, she's been following them throughout this war, and has been a longtime interlocutor of mine, and I think we've talked pretty regularly, Dara, over the course of this past year and a half, actually even more if we think about the buildup to the war and everything that's preceded it, so let's catch up.

The last episode I had was a fairly historic one. We talked about the original battle of Bakhmut back in 1708 with Alexander Burns and we talked about the Russian Imperial Army. Let's snap back to the present and talk about the state of things today. I'd be curious to hear what you think are the main issues we should look at when it comes to a state of the Russian armed forces some of what's been going on lately with the spate of attacks across Russia, the conversation regarding Ukrainian air defense. I want to pick that up as well, and a bit on where things are going. I know my impression is that this is a bit the calm before the storm. We're all in anticipation of the Ukrainian offensive, but let's catch up on the current state of affairs.

Dara Massicot: Well, thanks so much for having me back, Mike. I think that it's probably a good idea to take stock of where we are with this Russian winter offensive. It seems like it's basically petering out. It's been petering out for a few weeks now, and when you look back on it, back in January when we were talking about this, when they put Gerasimov back in charge, then a couple weeks later he's doing his classic six prong attack again on the Donbas front. I remember talking with you about it and thinking about, what are they doing? This force is not in the place to do this right now. The only aspects of it that still had any fight left in them were essentially the VDV guys that they had removed from Kherson and rested them up for a couple months, then they put them back on the line, but here we are a few months later, taking a lot of casualties, seeing things play out again, repetitive attacks on Vuhledar, and they've essentially gotten, what, I think 85% of Bakhmut you estimate?

Michael Kofman: It's something like that. It's hard to count block by block, but it seems to be thereabouts.

Dara Massicot: Every time I think about this, I think about how they would define these things. If you define, what is the combat capability of a unit that fights and tries to take a village for six months and can't do it? In the Russian thinking, you would declare that unit non-mission capable, and that's what we're seeing across the frontline at this point. I think that's the offensive side of the story. Defensively though, they have been working quite hard at creating multiple echelons of positions. They've got a trench network, they've got the dragon teeth, which are the little concrete barriers that are shaped by triangles.

Michael Kofman: What's jokingly been called the Toblerone line.

Dara Massicot: A Toblerone line. I do enjoy Toblerone. Now I'm thinking about chocolate, so let me take a chocolate moment. Toblerone is delicious. Going back to the war, but they've also used the terrain pretty wisely in some places occupying the heights. So, there's a good bit of work going on defensively, and I think that that will prove challenging for an upcoming offensive on the Ukrainian side. Not impossible, but it might slow them down. What do you think?

Michael Kofman: So to be frank, I think that Russians have built out, as best I can tell, several defensive lines. They have multiple minefields, they have entrenchments, and they have sort of initial lines. They have some capacity from a newer defense. I don't know if the force can do it, but doctrinally, it's clear that they've built out spacing for it. They have a sort of main line, they have reserve lines. They've kitted out a lot of the reserve territorial troops to mobilize troops with anti-tank guns and people think, "Oh, these MT-12s are ancient." They are, you're right. It's no modern ATGM. They do still have, I think, quite a few ATGMs, but it seems like a lot of the older kit has been going to these mobilized territorial troops. So big question is, are they going to have the mass? I think to some extent they will, but certainly Ukraine should be able to establish an advantage in some parts of the front, local superiority.

But the whole point of these lines is to be clear, they're meant to be unbreachable, nothing is unbreachable or unpenetrable. They're meant to attrit the assaulting force to canalize it, to have it used up its breaching equipment and to over time prevent them from developing any kind of momentum. Now, is that going to work out for the Russian military? I don't know. A good question to kind of turn it back to you, a lot of people hinge the hope on us offensive to their assessment of Russian morale. The Russian morale will be low. The Russian forces are most likely going to break, and I think they're hoping it's going to be more like Kharkiv than Kherson.

Dara Massicot: It could be, and this is where I think we have to admit that the fog and friction of war is really intense right now. I think there's different parts of the frontline that are in better shape morale wise, which is an important part of this, and there's other parts of it where you have exhausted humans in muddy trenches who are being poorly led. Their commanders are 80 kilometers behind them because they don't want to get hit with GMLRs. So, how is that group going to react when all of a sudden there's an armored unit coming up on them? We don't know. So, there's a lot of different ways that this could go. Morale wise, there's all sorts of stories coming out of the frontline now about the same thing that we've been hearing for months where if you desert, you'll be shot or you'll be put in this holding pen and you'll be beaten by Wagner or whoever.

It's a really compoundingly horrific situation, and the problem is, I don't know if folks realize this, but everybody in the Russian military is essentially stop lost at this exact moment. No one is allowed to resign, no one is allowed to leave the service. If your contract is up, you will be there indefinitely. If you're mobilized, you're mobilized until the end of the special military operation, that is very open-ended. Nobody can leave that. That is a morale killer. Those folks have been in combat positions for longer than even the Russian military says... The maximum tolerance is like 21 to 28 days on the frontline, and everyone is well above that. So, we really have not a great insight of what's happening in those trenches and in those defensive positions.

Michael Kofman: Sure, and I think one of the challenges that probably... This is the big unknown factor and what shaped it the most is the winter offensive, exhausting the Russian military. They just sort of stabilized their lines. It looked like Surovikin was pursuing a fairly reasonable strategy. I don't want to give him too much credit, but to be honest, it looked like he was one of the more competent generals that got assigned in the fall. His strategy was primarily defensive, focus on force reconstitution, entrench it, rebuild manning tables, and have Wagner troops assault Bakhmut, which looked a bit ridiculous at the time, but in retrospect, if I was to play devil's advocate, that did force a shifting of Ukrainian forces to Bakhmut at a time when the Russian units were quite vulnerable in December and January, and I think it may have taken a lot of pressure off of Russian lines outside of places like Kreminna, as costly as it was for Wagner troops from strategically, that battle may have served Surovikin's purpose.

Dara Massicot: It may have and if you look at the casualties, and there's many numbers out there, I really have been impressed by the work that BBC and MediaZona are doing because they verify actual funerals going on in Russia. And so, it's a low count because it relies on a publicly announced funeral, but if you look at who has been actually killed in action the most since January, it's been convicts, then the second largest group is mobilized. The mobilized, that's a problem, and it's a growing problem for the Russians, but no, I agree. There's not a lot of people in Russia who are up in arms about the convicts that are fighting for Wagner being killed. As a strategy, that seems to be... This sounds super cynical the way we're talking about the human beings, but as a strategy, you can see how they would come to that place.

Michael Kofman: Although obviously it wasn't just convicts fighting, but they do appear to have been the distinct majority of Wagner forces, to me, the reason why using convicts was a much lower cost measure rate was because they represented a minimal training investment. They weren't taking them out of the economy. One of the biggest problems with mobilization is that you're taking people out of a labor strapped economy to begin with, and lots of people also fled. So for the Russian leadership, mobilization is a hard proposition. You can't just waste mobilized troops... Well, they can, but I'm saying they shouldn't because those are people they took from the economy, and if they keep taking them, they're going to have a severe... They already have very significant skill shortages, and on top of that, as you said, people don't miss convicts, they don't have the same political ramifications.

Dara Massicot: No, and you can see there's a financial component to this too. So if you're mobilized in Russia, you are paid pretty well. These people are not being paid like their actual conscripts. They're being paid roughly equivalent, and in some cases actually better than contract service personnel. Their bonus pay and their combat pay is pretty high. They have a lot of social guarantees because they're essentially trying to make a bitter pill less bitter for the families and the mobilized. They're very expensive if you think about it. Also, they legally have their job held for them for I think a period of two years. So, that goes back to the labor issue you're talking about. You have all these enterprises in Russia who suddenly are down all these workers and they can't cut them from the books. They don't pay them, but they can't cut them, and it's a complicated issue.

One of the things I've seen recently is in Russia, if you are a dependent, you do not receive any of the death benefits until the body essentially is found and identified for two years. So basically, if let's say you're killed in Ukraine and no one is retrieving your body, your spouse cannot collect on your benefits if they never find you. He or she, but in this case it's a she, they have to wait for two years before they see a dime. And so, a lot of the widows are starting to complain pretty publicly about this now, and so we'll see what they do in terms of closing loopholes.

Michael Kofman: I did not know that, that's a pretty interesting finding. I think that in general, it's worth talking about the fact that the Russian military, once again, has a structural manpower problem. They solved the big issue they had last year with mobilization. Stereotypically, they solved it way too late. We've talked about those before. We've extensively studied mobilization plans together and Russian doctrine several months before a large scale or regional war. And of course, they did none of that in eight months until the war chose to mobilize when they used the force, spent all the people that were going to train the mobilized personnel, had already lost much of the equipment, and were basically using us to fill the gaps, but let's fast-forward to where we are today. Gerasimov's winter offensive, which was as sort of shambolic and ill timed as you could expect, and it showed absolutely zero learning because-

Dara Massicot: Zero learning.

Michael Kofman: It's actually remarkable because you would assume that he would literally not attempt the same things that they had tried at the beginning of the war, and it's phenomenal because they literally attempted the exact same thing along a spread front where they could establish no significant advantage in correlation of forces along any fight. They essentially got stopped with no gains at Vuhledar, at Avdiivka, at Marinka, by Kreminna, didn't get anywhere near Kupiansk, not a lot of progress with Bilohorivka. Only place you can look to is Bakhmut, which is the one place where Wagner was fighting backed by the Russian Airborne, but that's a battle that goes all the way back to August. So, it the spread offense of basically... I don't know, you and I have similar thoughts on Gerasimov, but-

Dara Massicot: It's pretty bad, guys. This is the thing, when they announced this in January, I had a pretty negative reaction to it. They just don't learn and this guy botched the initial offensive. They put in a new guy who seemed to have a pretty appropriate understanding of the position they were in, wanted to go onto the defensive, and before demoting him, publicly humiliate him by making him go before Shoigu to do this press conference about why we need to withdraw from Kherson, blah, blah, blah. They've never done that before and they've never done it since. Anyway, it's personality politics here, and so you give Gerasimov a second opportunity to excel, and I mean that in the sarcastic way, and he did the exact same thing, just continuing to fail in repetitive, yet intricate ways, and it's astounding.

Michael Kofman: He exhausts the force once again, and he does the Ukrainian military the biggest favor he can by putting them at least in a much better position that they might have been for this offensive operation. His offensive creates a whole lot more casualties, he weighs several naval infantry brigades with Vuhledar. A whole bunch of mobilized personnel get rotated into the fight at Avdiivka. That's where a lot of the complaint videos came from on YouTube, for those of you who had seen them.

They were sort of seconded to DNR and rotated up there in battalion sized groups, and he once again set up a situation where it looks like Russian leadership is trying to conduct a huge nationwide recruitment campaign because they want to avoid another wave of mobilization, but I've been on the record saying that I'm very skeptical this campaign will work. I think they're probably going to have to conduct another wave of mobilization. I think they're going to wait to see what happens with the Ukrainian offensive, but if the Ukrainian offensive severely wounds the Russian military, which it stands a decent chance of doing, I think they're probably going to be looking at a second wave later this year.

Dara Massicot: I agree with that assessment completely. I think that they are trying to see what kind of numbers they can get from going around and asking people, and again, they are offering an incredible amount of incentives. The money is two to three times, sometimes four times as much as the median salary. This is a lot of money for some people. The social benefits, they've dialed them all up for... You get veteran status for the rest of your life, you get healthcare, you get free mental healthcare. Of course, they don't have enough.

There's all sorts of benefits for your children. I think there's now a 10% quota in Russian universities for either the veterans themselves or their children. So, their education will be taken care of and people aren't buying it. They're sniffing this out and going, "No, I'm talking to my friends. My wife is talking to another wife. This is a terrible plan." So, it's going to fall short. They've never recruited 400,000 people in a single year, ever, since they've tried professional contract service, and so they'll do some math and go, "Okay, we've got, I don't know, 30,000, 50,000 people now we got to bring in the hard way," and I think it'll be this summer or maybe the fall, depending on what happens.

Michael Kofman: So, I see that they've increased the biennial conscription, they've gone from 120-some-thousand to 147, so it looks like they've added maybe around 20 to 30,000 people per conscription pool, and my guess was that they were going to try to put people that they had drafted and recruit by other means on the contract and basically slide them over onto the contractor books that way as best they could. I definitely don't see them picking up 400,000. I agree with you, I think it's worth getting into the conversation of how they got there, and this takes us back to a conversation we've had before about Shoigu and Gerasimov. Why do they need all these people? Well, they need them because they're trying to build a military to fight the war. What does that military look like? So, military looks like everything being converted to divisions, two new military districts stood up and all this, but these look like fantasy numbers on paper.

And what they look like to me, and I'm sure I've said this before, is it looks like the two people who are both 67 years old, this is going to sound ageist, but Gerasimov is way past retirement age and extended multiple times, their conclusion is that the Russian military was a halfway house between kind of a Soviet mobilization army with a lot of older equipment, but a strong mobilization basis and biennial conscription and what have you, and a sort of permanent standing, more Western style force, more modern capabilities and means of command and control. The problem with the Russia military was that it actually wasn't Soviet enough, and that they want to rebuild the Soviet Army because it's what they know.

Dara Massicot: But not with the Soviet population, and not with the Soviet economy, and not with the Soviet defense industrial base. Congratulations, Gerasimov, on this wonderful idea that you've made.

Michael Kofman: I was in a meeting this morning and we were having a sort of similar conversation, and I advanced a very simple, and it's not the most thoughtful theory of why this is not going to work. This is very straightforward, as you said. Russia isn't the Soviet Union. That's why it can't build the army that the Soviet Union built.

Dara Massicot: No, and they're actively destroying what remains of the Soviet Army right now by everything they've pulled out of storage in Siberia. They're just emptying out these storage bases and when that's gone, they can't rebuild that. It'll take them decades if they were going to commit to it to rebuild all the pieces of equipment that they've lost.

Michael Kofman: They're consuming their Soviet legacy basically, the inheritance that they received of all this equipment, and after this, it is going to be a much thinner military, and I'll be curious how they'll try to run a partial mobilization army or even potentially a largely mobilization army, depending on what comes of it, when they're not actually going to have the equipment in storage left over.

Dara Massicot: I agree, and I think we're all probably thinking about, what does reconstitution look like? What does regeneration look like? And Shoigu has put his idea on the table. Shoigu won't be around forever. Someone will come behind him, and I think probably will have to make some adjustments because demographically, economically, this whole notion of we're going to have this Soviet 2.0 version of the ground forces, it makes no sense.

Michael Kofman: The only way it kind of makes sense, one of the criticism I've heard in the past, and it's clever, although I don't think it's entirely fair, and it's that Shoigu could build sort of a cosplay Soviet military and I like it, but I like it only in a sense that that's not really what the Russian military was. The actual problem with it was that it wasn't a cosplay Soviet military, but that's clearly what Shoigu and Gerasimov want to build now.

Dara Massicot: Yes, I would say that they're learning the wrong lessons from this. 15 years ago... I can't believe it's been that long ago, the Russian military was dismantled from doing the very thing that it was doing when it invaded Ukraine. The leadership at the time before Shoigu and Gerasimov said, "We don't need to fight another large scale land war in Europe. We don't need all of these divisions. We can't afford to have 500 military facilities with all these derelict vehicles," and they dismantled it from that. And here we are, flash forward 14 years later, I don't know if it was Putin and Patrushev having too much spare time during COVID isolation and cooking what they've come up with for Ukraine, but they literally asked the military to do the one thing that it was dismantled from being able to do well.

And despite that, they didn't use the time in 2021 to do all the preparations that they would need to do this successfully, that Gerasimov wrote about, that he knows very well the things you have to do to bring an invasion force like this online, didn't do it. They only started that when they declared mobilization, which is insane. It's just so many questions. I hope someone's keeping the receipts over there. One day we'll see the receipts of everything that went down.

Michael Kofman: No, I'm sure that the main challenge though we're going to have is if this doesn't all come out via the Mill Blog or channels and these other places they set up where people can vent what they know happened and the rumors, I think this time it'll lot come out a lot faster. The thing that always worries me is that we'll have the sort of Stalin death effect where none of the generals will be able to say what really happens as long as Putin's alive and in charge, and only after his death will we begin to see the writing about what really happened and who did what.

I'm thinking this time around, it's going to come around much faster because Putin's regime is not Stalin's regime, but this is just kind of remembering and reflecting that after World War II, a lot of Soviet generals couldn't write critically about what really happened and why as long as Stalin was alive. That was just the reality. After his death, you saw a real change in the tenor of the history, but if we could turn a bit to maybe current events, so there's a theory out there that I've heard, I find it quite comical. Let's discuss it, that the Kremlin would've struck itself twice with a drone before the Victory Day parade. Dara, what do you think about this?

Dara Massicot: So, let's go on a false flag journey, when the Russians are doing false flag operations. If we go back to the run-up to the invasion, there were a series of very sloppy attempts to justify this. And when I say sloppy, I mean showing footage of a "Ukrainian terrorist attack", using footage from a TV show and mannequins or another case where they were showing, I think a car bomb or something like that, but they were using cadavers that had visible signs of being autopsied, like an autopsy cadaver. It was just really sloppy mistakes, and this did not bear any of those signs of that. Back to your original question, there are false flags that I believe the Russians would do, but penetrating the mystique of the impenetrable Moscow air defense? No, I don't think that's one and penetrating the mystique that somehow you can get to Putin and where he works?

I just don't think that those two things are the things that they would choose to do. Final point on that, if it was a false flag, we would have seen the media apparatus snap into place, there would be speeches lined up, Putin addresses the nation, yada, yada yada, as Seinfeld would say, but we didn't see any of that. It's been drone strikes on Ukraine, it's been missile strikes pretty much every night since then, but they haven't addressed it. And I think Dmitry Patrushev had a really good point. It took them 12 hours from the time it was hit until they came out with a press statement. That's a really long time when your capital has been hit and exploded. What do you think, Mike?

Michael Kofman: It's almost as though they didn't do it, and that theory makes no sense.

Dara Massicot: Well, we have seen over the years what the Russians look like when they're truly shocked by an incident. I would say when Wagner forces were engaged kinetically in Syria by the United States.

Michael Kofman: The fiasco by Deir ez-Zor in back end.

Dara Massicot: By Deir ez-Zor.

Michael Kofman: I think it was February 2018.

Dara Massicot: Yes, when Wagner found out. Wagner messed around and they found out and the Kremlin didn't know what to do about it, and they were kind of stunned into silence for quite some time. It's been my experience when they encounter these kind of unexpected events, it takes them a while to come up with what to say, and I don't see any of the hallmarks that they would capitalize on this and use it to promote some kind of huge escalation. They can escalate whenever they want and they have escalated whenever they want. What do you think?

Michael Kofman: I think, honestly, to me, I'm an Occam's razor person. I think that this is what it most looks like, which is an attack by Ukrainian services, if I was going to bet, I guess, were designed to embarrass the Russian leadership, damage the myth, which I know is an objective of some of the Ukrainian attacks, damage the myth of Russian power, to maybe secondarily even have positive military effects to force Russia to concentrate more on air defense of certain key targets back home because the air defense requirements in Ukraine actually spread them quite thin.

This goes without saying, Ukraine's a very large country. Russia has a lot of forces deployed in Ukraine. The requirements for Ukraine and Crimea alone are quite high for air defense. When you include Belgrade, Rostov-on-Don, some of the other cities just there on the perimeter, it's already a pretty significant toll. And so by the way, this one folks say, "Well, what does it say about Russian air defense?" It says different things, just to be clear. First, Russia's a massive country. It is very hard to provide air defense for a country like that, especially if you're going to have a low flying drones as a target and your air defense coverage is optimized for something else.

Dara Massicot: Moscow's supposed to be locked tight... Or not locked tight, but pretty locked tight. It has those panzers on the roof now.

Michael Kofman: Well, look, it's one thing to have-

Dara Massicot: I'm being tongue in cheek, everybody.

Michael Kofman: It's one thing to have the optics of that, but then there's the reality of probably even if the air defense was active, they didn't engage because for a lot of air defense operators, if you see a target that's kind of like a drone, that's a small drone, and it looks closest to maybe a bird, and they don't think there's going to be... We have to keep in mind, the Russian mentality is that to some extent they're invulnerable when they're dealing with Ukraine and it's hard to shake them out of it. So to some extent, you can see that there's a real advantage to the Ukrainian strikes because a lot of Russian operators will probably assume that whatever they're seeing... It certainly cannot be an attack drone launched against Moscow because that's not a thing that's happened, I think, in practice probably since World War II.

Dara Massicot: I think enough time has passed since that event occurred, and there hasn't been this sort of big response if they had done it to themselves to justify something, well, what did they justify? And they haven't done anything. So, I think this is an embarrassment that they just can't even discuss, and if you look at over the last couple weeks or even longer, there's been all sorts of weird drone incidents, train incidents, fuel incidents, things are exploding in Russia, and you don't really see them talking about that either. It's like they don't have a narrative why this is happening, why they can't stop it.

Michael Kofman: Absolutely, and it's clear that these are strike operations being done most likely by Ukrainian services in advance of this upcoming, or at least anticipated offensive, and the Russian leadership can't do much about it any more than they could if you remember back in last August. Remember that kind of gap between when the Russian offense ran out steam in July, and there was this intervening period where there was an anticipated Ukraine offensive? There's a host of sabotage operations. There were strikes in Crimea, and then eventually we had the Kerch Strait Bridge bombing as well, which was a pretty significant event.

No, it's clear to me that Russia remains quite vulnerable to various forms of sabotage, but I think the only other key event that at least I remember, which is at least significant from a technical perspective, is Ukrainians with the US Patriot managed to shoot down that ALBM, the Kinzhal, which I have a very... I'm not fond of parties in the sense that I don't think that there's anything interesting about that weapon system. It's basically like 1960s technology. It's just an Iskander with the booster stage lobbed off, and it's using the aircraft as the first stage to fire an ALBM, and the air launch ballistic missile, and air launch ballistic missiles have been with us since the '60s, folks, for those of you listening to us, but you're a much stronger expert on air defense. I'm curious what you think.

Dara Massicot: I kind of had this reaction to it as well when it was confirmed that that Patriot crew was in Fort Sill not that long ago, working really hard to learn this system, and they deployed to Ukraine. I don't know how long exactly that they were there and in place, and then all of a sudden, here comes this Mach five, Mach six, whatever it was traveling at the time, launched presumably from Belarus, and that's not a lot of warning time. We're talking minutes and a system that they've never used before in combat, and they nailed it. So, I take your point on the Kinzhal itself might not be super exciting, but just from where we went to that engagement, it was a short amount of time and well done on that crew.

Michael Kofman: No, it's impressive. I think it helps to deal with an error impression that I had to deal with at least very early on to this war that, well, you see this equipment that we make in the United States there, it's very complicated and other people just take forever to train how to use it and to use it as well as we would use it, and this is always a bit of a degree of chauvinism that's in there, but part of it I think is bred from experience of dealing with partners in maybe Central Asia and Middle East from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and working with Ukrainians showed that we really need to get out of this attitude. The two impediments, at least I saw early on in the war where one, a fear of escalation if we provide X Russian response might be Y, but the second was, oh, it'll take too long.

It'll be hard to train them. This equipment is very, very advanced and it'll take them forever to learn how to use and what have you, or at least they won't be able to use it as well. And look, there's one thing to say... Let's be clear, it's one thing to say you can use the equipment in a combat role. There's a whole lot that goes into maintaining it, servicing it, being able to repair it, and there are a lot of challenges there and things that the United States has worked with Ukraine. I don't want to be kind of facetious and say, "All the risk to knowing how to use equipment is shooting it at the target it's supposed to hit." There's a lot more that goes into maintaining-

Dara Massicot: Some WD-40 and duct tape.

Michael Kofman: And if it breaks, you just hit it really hard with a wrench and then you get some duct tape, but anyway, I hope my point here is coming across. It is impressive and it's notable enough if they can make good use of a Patriot battery, then it says something about their capacity to learn and integrate Western equipment.

Dara Massicot: Just thinking about what the Ukrainian arms forces are dealing with, they're in a position to teach us something about a missile war and teach us something about large combined arms tactics. They're experiencing things other than the Russians, who else has experienced lately at this scale and intensity for this long?

Michael Kofman: I remember there a while ago, there was this meme going around, and on one side of the kind of the Joe cartoon, there was a US instructor that worked as a loader at some point in Iraq, and he was training this course of Ukrainians who had basically wiped out the better part of the first guards tank division.

Dara Massicot: First guard's tank.

Michael Kofman: And they're all sitting in the classroom saying, "Please tell us how you really fight and please teach us about armored warfare."

Dara Massicot: Right, there's just an incredible amount of knowledge, honestly, that they can be teaching to us if they're in a position later where they want to talk about it. They may not want to.

Michael Kofman: Well, let's get to maybe what I think might be the last point of our conversation. Offensive expectation, so I came out today with an article with Rob on foreign affairs, and the thrust of our argument was, look, we don't know what's going to happen in the offensive. Ukraine has built out a new force. The Russian defenses aren't tested and manned by mobilized personnel. We actually don't know either of the two forces coming up against each other in this operation, and it's pointless to make predictions on the score. We think Ukraine will make gains, we think they'll probably be successful, but that's not going to end the war. In the best case scenario, it won't end the war, and so the conversation we were trying to have in the piece was about the need to plan for a long war, the need to think through what follows as offensive and not to place too many bets on this offensive and not expect that something miraculous is going to happen in this specific operation.

Because if you just have a wait and see approach, what that follows, this operation, potentially, five months of a traditional warfare. If you play it out, and this offensive lasts several months, let's say it achieves all its objectives, best case scenario, still, unless you believe that the entire Russian military collapses and Putin wants to quit the war, and I'm going to honestly ask you if you think that might happen, the challenge is you really have to have a sustained effort. You have to have a demonstrated plan, and you can't have an approach of, well, we will try this, and then depending on how it plays out, we might try something else next year or let's say five, six months later because it'll give Russia an opportunity to conduct another mobilization wave and restabilize the lines, rebuild reserves, conduct another winter offensive and what have you. You've introduced uncertainty and indeterminacy into the prospect of what happens then in the war over the course of this year going to the next, but anyway, I just wanted to lay that out and see if I could get a reaction from you.

Dara Massicot: I don't know that some of the conversations like this is, this is it, this is the big show, or whatever words are being thrown out there about this. I think that is the wrong way to look at this. If you put too much expectations on this because you don't understand that this is a process that takes time... I'm sure we all want the Russians to stop being inside Ukraine, please go home. If you're listening to this podcast, do it for me, please just leave. By putting these kind of pressures and expectations on the Ukrainian counter offensive, if things go poorly one day or two days or three days, people will start to say, "Oh, it's all collapsing. It's all falling apart." Don't put that kind of pressure on it. War, as we've seen, it ebbs and flows that's kind of my position, and I would agree with you, and I think the Ukrainians are saying this too, please kind of simmer down with that.

Michael Kofman: Because it creates a huge risk for them. If the offensive is not a clear cut success and expectations are so high, it freights one operation with expectations they'll struggle to fulfill, but most importantly, the downside is much higher, the disappointment is much higher, and one of the key objectives they have is to maintain Western material assistance. So, they have to demonstrate both that the proof of concept and training equipment worked, they were able to make significant gains, that the Russian army was beaten and seen as beaten. But if they can't live up to any of those expectations, then the disappointment will be much greater, and I also worry about that. I worry both about the inherent planning deficiency of a wait and see approach, and then if you build out the timelines based on the experience for this offensive, what if it takes another five months? Well, that takes you into the winter.

If it takes you into the winter, there probably won't be another Ukraine offensive potentially. We could be in a scenario where the Russian military doesn't have offensive potential, certainly not without mobilization or something like that. So, the downside for Ukraine of this operation is low, but if it's not successful or if it is successful, either way, there's a strong chance that they will not be in position to conduct another offensive operation this year, just because of the way the West seems to have planned assistance and has done us out. That's just my own impression. I'm not saying that's what's going to happen. I'm not saying I know that to be true. That's the impression I have based on what I know in May at this point in the conversation.

Dara Massicot: And I can just say from just looking at where the Russian forces are at right now and what they're looking at on their end, there has to be a recognition in Moscow that our time for offensives are done, and I think they're done for the rest of this year. I think they just could be done, frankly. If you look at how they're digging in, they're digging in along all the regions that they think that they have annexed and owned, and they're digging in on the Russian border as well to Belgrade. That's kind of to me like a map of ambitions. Moscow, we no longer have ambitions that we're going to take the eastern half of Ukraine. They've put down markers on the ground for what they think that they can reasonably sustain, but that being said, they have shown over the course of the last year that the person who is able to make Putin feel good about himself and how this war is going is the general that they'll listen to, and I really have doubts that they're getting an honest appraisal of their situation.

Michael Kofman: No, I think that's fair. I think that there remains a clear mismatch between Russian political goals and military means, and a lack of understanding of what the military can and can't do. Most likely because if Putin talking to people like Gerasimov and Shoigu, the people that sold him the prospect of this winter offensive, then he likely has a pretty unrealistic perception understanding of the state of the Russian military, and I think that's why originally back in last year, he was trying to talk to Surovikin, and Surovikin earned significant disfavor with senior leadership by telling Putin what's really going on and how it is.

But I also suspect, and I don't have evidence for this, this is just my own personal hunch, that they sold Putin like you're still in withdrawal by saying that if they do that, consolidate lines, then they'll be in a position to at least take the Donbas, which is what he wants, and I think that that's what Gerasimov tried to pursue in the winter, and the Russian military was in no position to conduct that campaign. And Gerasimov, as we discussed, learned nothing from the previous campaign and basically tried to do it in the exact same way, and it worked in the exact same way it worked last year, which is to say it went very badly.

Dara Massicot: I think, Mike, that he deserves his own verb, and I think that verb is Gerasimovavat.

Michael Kofman: Gerasimovavat?

Dara Massicot: Gerasimovavat, to Gerasimov. There is a reflexive to Gerasimov oneself as he has done, but the working definition that I have of this verb is to fail repeatedly in intricate and yet catastrophic ways, to Gerasimov. I'll use it in a sentence. Gee, I've been preparing for my dissertation for five years. I hope I don't Gerasimov myself, but really, this is the second time that he's done this.

Michael Kofman: I like this term. You're going to create competition for Mark Galeotti in clever term generation. If Mark's listening to this, he knows what we're talking about.

Dara Massicot: I copyrights and Gerasimovavat.

Michael Kofman: And on that, at least somewhat more comical note, I think we should close out here. Dara, thanks a lot for coming back on the podcast. I hope to have you again before too long.

Dara Massicot: Well, thanks for having me.

Michael Kofman: It's been a great conversation and thanks everyone for tuning in. I hope you'll listen to the next episode and also the regular War on the Rocks podcast I do with Ryan Evans.