George Barros

Currently, the Russians seem to be able to maintain a volunteer recruitment campaign that is able to meet and probably exceed the current casualty rate that the Russian forces are suffering in the theater. Let us remind the listener that the Ukrainians impose about 35,000 duties per month. And the Russians have consistently been able to recruit up to that level.

Well, we got some data points recently that's suggesting, give us a nice sense of what the current Russia recruitment level is. So Vladimir Putin just last week mentioned that the Russians recruit about up to 60,000 troops per month. I don't have any independent confirmation of that concrete integer, but it's consistent with the other data that we've seen.

The Ukrainians have provided their accounts for the casualties aggregated over the course of a year, which roughly equates to a number similar to that. We know that in previous months, about six months ago, the Russians were recruiting closer to 35 to 45,000 per month, about a one-to-one for their replacement.

But then, of course, in his Senate testimony a few weeks ago, the commander of American UCOM, General Cavoli, mentioned that the Russians were reconstituting and generating forces at a faster rate than what most Western analysts had expected. So, this higher number is sort of consistent with those various different factors. But I want to make a very clear point here.

The Russians, in our assessment, are not going to be able to recruit 60,000 guys per month indefinitely. The Russians are employing some very clever tactics to try to maximize the number of recruits that they can get. And they're doing things like putting forward these insane, very expensive one-time recruitment bonuses, the current being about $35,000 to $40,000 a pop just for your signup.

And oftentimes, what they'll do is they'll employ them with these temporary surges. So, you're only eligible to get that signup bonus if you sign up, say, between May 16th and May 27th. They'll put it up there for like a week. And so, if you sign up during this time, then you can take advantage of that juicy deal.

And look, you can certainly try to squeeze the juice that way, but in terms of a sustainable training pipeline, a sustainable force generation pipeline that can do this for many years on end, this is not looking particularly financially feasible, especially as we watch the damage this is doing to the Russian economy and their sovereign wealth fund.

Sure. They're all being encouraged to volunteer, that's for sure, but they're not conscripts. In the Russian military, there is a mandatory military service, a lottery that begins when you're at the age of 18 and you are liable to be conscripted and serve for up to a year. Conscripts by Russian law cannot fight in Russian wars outside of Russian territory. The Russians have

made legal amendments to have that include the parts of Ukraine that they've annexed that the Russians legally define as Russia. So conscripts can't fight in Ukraine. And this is a big red line for the Kremlin.

In a few instances, scandalous instances where conscripts were sent to go fight in Ukraine, that resulted in some major blowback and some major instances of Putin had to find fall guys that he threw under the bus for that and families were compensated and all of that. So conscripts don't fight in Ukraine.

The Russians in their own legal classification, they have a class of service member that they call volunteers. And these are volunteers that are going to go by Ukraine. Now, the way that the Russians try to get the volunteers are multifold. Number one, they'll offer you tremendous financial incentives to go and volunteer and that's the way that that works.

But what they'll also do is they'll recruit from the conscript class. So, for example, say you're an 18 to 25-year-old Russian man and you're wrapping up your one-year compulsory service because you're a conscript. Well, what the recruiters will do is they will go to you and they will say, hey, you really want to sign this volunteer.

You want to now change your status and change it from being conscript to volunteer so you can go fight. And we're going to give you all this money and we're going to promise you this, that, and the other thing and try to make it look really good for you. And then that's how they get you.

There are also instances where sometimes the conscripts are pressured or they'll go after Russians that have debts, the remittances, they'll go after criminals too. A popular tactic now to get out of debts or student loans or be able to absolve yourself of a criminal record is go volunteer in Ukraine.

You're having problems with the law, well, you want to go to that court here, you could go volunteer to fight. And so, these are the various different ways that they get to that number. Okay.

It depends on the type of unit that they go to. Specialists get specialist training. If you're going to be a drone operator or a radio man or an electronic warfare engineer, you will get more specialized training. Typically, those are specialized conscripts that will be recruited for specialist roles. Those are really the very creme de la creme special sort of things.

Now, the vast majority of the so-called unwashed masses that just get funneled into light infantry, frontal assault, suicide squad sort of stuff, they'll be lucky if they get up to a month of training. And when you watch the combat footage of when they go and fight and how they're deployed tactically, I mean, they are wasted at scale.

I was just in Ukraine last week and I got a data point from a senior Ukrainian officer who told me that Ukrainian forces conducted 5,000 FPV quadcopter drone strike missions just in the course of one day. And those were missions that were being flown against individual infantrymen, against vehicles, against tanks, that sort of thing.

So, those guys are basically given a rifle and maybe some basic team or if they're lucky, platoon level training. And then at that point, they're basically just sent off.

Sure. It's ebbed and flowed in terms of the monthly losses, depending on the tempo and the different phases of the war. My current running assessment is that the Russians suffer about 35 to 45,000 casualties killed or wounded per month. It's roughly a casualty rate of about 1,000 to depending 1,200 or 1,500 guys a day. In terms of over the entire scope of the war, if I remember correctly,

The most high confidence assessments that we've gotten from the US intelligence community and the British Ministry of Defense are the casualties are somewhere in the range of 600,000 to maybe 900,000. I believe that's the rough casualty count, if I recall. But I want to be very clear. I don't think anyone actually knows. I'm confident that the Russian government doesn't know.

I'm less sanguine about US intelligence estimates as well, because at the end of the day, in order to count the casualties, you actually have to physically control the territory. And even then, it's actually very difficult to do. So, these are always going to be ballpark estimates.

I think that's about right. There's the combat footage, there's classified documents that one can collect or the table of contents of organization of Russian units when they go get wrecked. How many times have Russian units been reconstituted? We know what the doctrinal end strength of what a Russian battalion should be, what a Russian brigade should be.

And so, when you see a unit have been sent back to a training ground or be reconstituted or filled with replacement a certain number of times, that gives you a sense for how many casualties has been taken. But there's also a great repository of Russian publicly available information that can be exploited as well.

There are Russian legal documents, for example, that have to do with things like wills, so you can count the number of wills that have been processed. There are cemeteries that exist that have had additional annexes built onto them. There are entirely brand new military cemeteries that have been established since 2022, which you can see from space.

You can also look at the number of obituaries that are posted online. The British BDC's Russian service has an excellent, I mean, truly excellent research, investigative research program where they look and they scour the Russian language social media internet to look for obituaries of service members posted by friends and family.

And last I checked, if I recall correctly, they've identified at least 90,000 plus confirmed obituaries. And of course, this is a sliver of the number of full casualties because not everyone gets a written obituary. But it's another data point that you can use to confirm to build towards the whole picture.

Yeah, thank you. So, it was a very quick trip. Just spent a couple days in Kyiv with some meetings, some officials, some military officials, some warfighters, and it was great. My first trip in Ukraine this year and got to go meet with some very interesting warfighters that are innovating, changing the nature of contemporary land warfare.

And I was also able to pick up a couple of data points for the current, the challenges that both sides are facing and get a sort of a bit of a tactical picture for what the fight is like. What was your key takeaway from this trip that you took? Sure. Neither side can conduct operational maneuver. Both sides are completely preoccupied with tactical and sub-tactical problems at the front.

It is pretty much how do you manage to move a squad, 10 guys? How do you move a platoon, 20 to 50 guys and get them from point A on a battlefield, 800 meters or 1200 meters to point B?

That has become incredibly difficult because the Russians and the Ukrainians within about a maybe 15 to 20 kilometer distance from the zero line, it is incredibly difficult to maneuver because the drone game that both sides are bringing out there is so aggressive.

Basically, anything that has a signature larger than a vehicle gets schwacked immediately and is resulting with some very interesting technological and tactical adaptations to try to overcome it.

Sure. So, both sides are trying to figure out how to be able to restore tactical maneuver, restore operational maneuver. So, on the Russian side, for example, they're experimenting now with new types of specialized units. So, these drones can fly very fast and they hit stuff. So, the Russians for the most part have greatly reduced

their use of armored personnel carriers and even providing vehicles for basic infantry maneuver as one would expect them to do by the Russian and Soviet textbook. They're now using motorcycles and they're actually building out a tactical doctrine for motorcycle platoons, motorcycle battalions, or how many motorcycles should be in an infantry battalion, for example.

And there's a coherent table of equipment for how many ATVs, how many buggies, how many motorcycles should these tactical units have? And the concept of operations is this, Mike. Because a armored personnel carrier has a big signature and it moves relatively slowly than a drone, it's an easy target for a drone.

But if you could put a guy on a motorcycle, with two guys on a motorcycle, and if they can blitz a line very quickly, if they can simply get to a glintage or a field fortification, like a trench or something, then there's about a 50-50 chance that those Russian infantrymen can take the trench.

And so, what they're doing now is they're trying to use vehicles that enable less protection, but more speed to carry a fewer number of people, but in a dispersed manner. That is the Russian tactical innovation, which is interesting. Mixed success rate, but it's the bleeding edge.

And then for the Ukrainian side, for their own tactical innovations, they are currently working on how to have machine vision for drones. how to have it so that you no longer need to have a physical pilot that will take out the enemy vehicles and enemy targets.

They're working to develop drones that are trained on AI models so that they can identify, hey, this is what an enemy tank looks like, this is what an enemy vehicle looks like, and then have a drone in the terminal phase take out the enemy object. This already actually exists in part for drones in air defense. This is not just land warfare.

The Ukrainians are using quadcopter drone interceptors with light payloads to intercept Iranian Shahed drones that the Russians use to strike across Ukraine every night. And they've gotten to it by putting specialized sensors on these drones. They're able to have the drones partially lock onto the Iranian one-way attack drones, and then a

FPV drone pilot being assisted by an automated radar will help guide the drone interceptor to take out the drone. That's very interesting because you're now in a place where you can take out an Iranian with a relatively cheap Ukrainian drone as opposed to a very expensive shoulder launch missile like an Igla or a Stinger or an even more expensive Patriot interceptor. So that's really fascinating.

And it seems to me that they've not yet gotten to the point where they can completely remove the human operator from the drone, but they are working deciduously to try to get to the point where you have basically autonomous drone on drone warfare where there is no human pilot involved in the terminal phase. Okay.

This is going to sound like a stupid question, but what is the key impetus for taking the human out of that scenario? Pilots are a huge rate determiner. So to have a skilled FPV drone pilot is a determinant of how many missions can you fly? What's your sortie rate? How many targets can you engage at a particular time?

And the Russians are actually going out of their way now to try to target and kill skilled Ukrainian FPV drone pilots. So pilots is a big enabler. And if you no longer need to pilot to be able to do your missions, then that removes one of the caps for your ability to fly the drones. Number one. Number two, electronic warfare.

Partially. So, for example, what you might do is you might fly your drone to an area where it's going to be saturated with just enemy targets. And then at that point, the need to discriminate will be minimized. And so, that way it's basically just going to say, hey, drone, I'm going to take you to a place where anything that you can see is going to be enemy target.

And now at this point, go ahead and do it yourself. At which point, yeah, you would not have a human in the operator for the go, no go.

That's correct. And there's a big concern about pressure side, at least among the Ukrainians, because a lot of the kit that the Russians use, the Ukrainians use too. Like T-72 battle tanks, for example. So, if you train a drone to recognize and do object classification on, hey, here's what a T-72 main battle tank looks like. Well, is that a Russian T-72 or is that a Ukrainian T-72? Right.

But I think the concept of operations here is, hey, if you drive the drone deep enough into the enemy control territory, say 10 to 15 kilometers away, and then to the place where you can have a geofence and say, hey, we don't have any friendly T-72 operating in the vicinity here. So, as soon as the drone therefore sees anything that looks like a T-72, you take it out. And that's the concept.

Now, the Russians have an interesting and different way of going about this. Whereas the Ukrainian response to electronic warfare jamming is, hey, just have the drones do it autonomously, the Russian response has been a little bit lower tech, but not necessarily less effective. They are using fiber optic drones.

So, they've now developed these specialized drones that have spooled up on the rear 10 or 15 kilometers worth of physical fiber optic cable. that has a hard line to the pilot. And so, what these drones can do is they can just fly unimpeded, unimpeded by electronic warfare systems, unimpeded by other radio interference.

And they're just hard line, like a tow guided missile straight to whatever kind of target they're working at. And so, these are some of the tactical innovations that the sides are implementing.

They rely on outside for providers for components. So, the Chinese basically have a monopoly on the high-end electronic electrical rotors that go into quadcopters. Basically, no other countries make them the good ones. I mean, there's a bunch of countries that make them, but apparently they're not the quality controls quite poor.

And so, interestingly, the Russians and the Ukrainians defense industrial base are really overexposed on China for those rotors.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, they stand to benefit too. And it makes me really scared as well because this is a capability that the U.S. is going to need too. And American industry doesn't have the capacity to build hundreds of thousands of drone rotors at a competitive price. So, it's a huge problem. And if there's any smart VCs out there that want to build a factory for something, drone

These are drone components that are made primarily at first in their inception for hobbyist aviation purposes, but now they have a great dual use in military applications. These drones, Mike, they're inflicting about 60% of the casualties right now on the Ukrainian side, or again, I'm sorry, for the Ukrainians against the Russians.

I mean, this is not just a capability among many, this has actually become the main thing that puts Russians in the dirt, which is incredible.

Absolutely. The tactical doctrine for how to do a platoon mechanized assault, battalion-sized mechanized assault, that doesn't work anymore because as soon as you leave your line of departure and you start heading towards the enemy positions, you start getting engaged before you're even within five kilometers of the zero line. 100% accurate. And not just for combat forces too.

It's changing concepts for how to do logistics. The Ukrainians have... Usually these unmanned ground vehicles that are hauling medicine and hauling ammunition and fuel, the Russians use them for casualty evacuations.

Though in the path where you might have a logistics platoon or a logistics company that'd be trucking all kinds of stuff with a physical driver exposing himself to risks, the Ukrainians have in some regards minimized that because now they'll have robots that are hauling the stuff to the frontline fighting forces. So, yeah, it's changing a lot of things about warfare.

So I think the key thing to focus on is Vladimir Putin very much decisively rejected U.S. President Donald Trump's very straightforward proposal for a 30-day unconditional ceasefire. Putin rejected that. He instead said, well, we'll talk about a ceasefire and energy infrastructure. We'll talk about a ceasefire on the Black Sea.

But the key issue there that he rejected the main area where the actual fighting is happening, the land domain, which is where 95% of the killing is at. So that's important not to lose sight of. The Russians continue to want to conduct conventional operations. They want to keep war fighting. They see a military solution to this conflict. They think that they can wait out the West.

They think they can wait out the Europeans. And time will tell whether or not we, the collective international community, are able to continue keeping the Ukrainians in the fight. This government, US government, they currently accept there's no military solution to this war. Frankly, as a student and a historian, I have to disagree.

If you look back in history, pretty much all wars actually have a military solution. It's just a question of on whose terms and when.

Yeah, precisely. I mean, it was not too long ago that Putin articulated the theory of victory, and his theory of victory continues to be the same. It's that it doesn't matter that the Russian military pound for pound is not as good as the US military. It's not the most professional military. They're advancing at a very slow rate. They're taking a horrific loss.

But Putin assesses that fundamentally, he can stomach a war of attrition. And as long as the West is not willing to continue keeping the Ukrainians in the fight Putin's going to win. And so Putin wants to protract the peace process. He wants to protract the negotiations.

He doesn't want to agree to a very straightforward 30-day ceasefire because Putin thinks that he actually can tactically win this thing by stringing everyone along.

Somewhere in the middle. I actually agree that there's tremendous vulnerabilities the Russians have taken, particularly on the economics. I'm actually sympathetic to that argument, but I would argue that Look, Putin is banking on the tempo of fighting going down. The real thing that's bankrupting the Russians at really banging up their economy, their inflation rate,

their unemployment, or rather not the unemployment, the labor shortage. There's not enough Russians to go around between the military and their domestic economy and their monetary policy. It's the war. I mean, there's a massive disruption to the Russian economy because of the war. The Ukrainians kill and wound on average 30 to 45,000 Russians per month.

Those are 30 to 45,000 people whose families are entitled to benefits. They are wounded veterans who are entitled to lifetime benefits. They are people that can no longer work in the domestic economy, contributing to that labor shortage. Putin is banking on that number coming down a little bit. He wants the tempo to slow down.

He's waiting for the American aid to run out so that maybe instead of taking 45,000 casualties per month, it goes down to something like 10,000 casualties a month, which then the Russians actually can deal with. But at the current rate of which the Russians are being lost and the high price going for a head breach, it's not sustainable.

Mike, to put it into perspective, it's insane how much the average Russian service member gets paid to go fight in Ukraine. The one-time signup bonus for fighting in Ukraine offered by Samara Oblast is 40,000 US dollars. One-time signup bonus. That's not including your salary, not including other benefits. That's why they're able to attract

tens of thousands of Russians per month, but it's bankrupting the Russian economy. I mean, their liquidity and their sovereign wealth fund, it's down from what it used to be around 100 billion US dollars before the war started in 2022. It's now down to somewhere in the bulk cargo, 45, $46 billion. And it's scheduled to be at the end of this year.

Yeah. This is on Wikipedia, it's in Google. If memory serves me, I believe the average or median annual salary in Russia is somewhere on the order of like $13,000, $16,000 a year.

Granted, Russia has an extreme level of wealth inequality because there's the very, very rich guys that live in Moscow and Petersburg, and then there's the people living out in the sticks in Siberia who make next to nothing. So it's very skewed.

I mean, Russia has a population or had a population of 150 million people before the war. Ukraine was around 40 to 45 million people. So, they're working with a little over a three to one manpower advantage net. But the Russians, despite this, they've not been able to decisively dominate the Ukrainians. I mean, the Russians only occupy 18 and a half percent of Ukraine.

And at the current tempo of operations, it's going to take them well over 80 years to occupy all of Ukraine.

Well, I think there's several things that Putin would consider to be a victory. If he could, for example, achieve a de facto veto over the NATO alliance and have the NATO alliance redo its charter and have the NATO alliance and the NATO side preemptively say, as part of an agreement, it's okay. As part of the agreement, you can't get into NATO. I think that'd be a massive win.

Because as you know, NATO's charter includes an open invitation to any member state that meets the membership criteria. But if we change that and then allow the Russians to have a veto over NATO, that's a huge win.

I think Putin also wants to, at a minimum, continue seething in war fighting for the territory of the four provinces that he declared annexed back in fall 2022, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson Oblast, none of which the Russians occupy in their entirety.

and which would likely take a current pace at least two to three years to finish war fighting, assuming that there's not a massive collapse on either side. But it's a tall order and I think there's no... Realistically, I don't really think there's an end in sight. You don't think it's an end in sight to the current conflict, to the war? In the short term, no.

Because look, if the last piece of American aid is going to be that presidential draw, the President Biden authorized for the part of the office, Putin's just going to outweigh it. That aid is scheduled to last through maybe a few more months, certainly not get the Ukrainians through the summer. We'll have to see what the Europeans end up doing. What extent can they offset Americans?

I'm highly skeptical of that. We could talk about the reasons why. At which point, the Russians will actually be able to, I think, stalling the tempo better, operate a little bit more effectively. And if they can get some other concessions from the US, which in my opinion would be a massive mistake, sanctions relief,

cutting off intelligence sharing for the Ukrainians, and all this under the rubric of normalization with the Russians and that sort of thing, then the Russian rate of advance will expand drastically.

Very difficult to forecast this administration, Mike. Yeah, good point.

Look, if we look at President Trump's stated objectives, which include not getting Ukraine into Minsk III, a band-aid fix that they're simply just going to not solve the underlying causes of the conflict, but just give the Russians a reprieve to go back into Ukraine at the time of their choosing, then this is going to be really bad. Trump said he doesn't want Minsk III.

Trump says that he wants a robust, stable peace. He wants to ensure that this is permanently over and settled. And those are all good and positive things. Now, if you look at the current Russian demands, they're not compatible with President Trump's stated objectives, which means that actually it's the Russians who have to be coerced into concessions.

I think President Trump has exhausted or come close to exhausting the options of, hey, we make some concessions. The Ukrainians make some concessions, the Russians make some concessions, and they're on turn. That's not working out. So now, I think imposing a decision point on President Trump, which is, we try with carrots, how are we going to use sticks?

And part of the ways that you can go with the sticks are, of course, the economic tools against Russia. Try to target the price of oil, bring it down, cooperate with OPEC. German-American, like cheaper gas prices as well. You could hit the Russians with some tariffs or other things, but our trade volume is pretty low, so it's not really going to be a decisive tool there.

The biggest tool that you could do is keep Ukrainians in the fight. You give them more aid, give them support. You give them the intelligence so that they're charging, you'd be that more effective, even if we don't give them anything else. And then you continue to tell Vlad, well, Vlad, we're going to give the Ukrainians enough to keep them in the fight for another six months.

And that means for another six months, you're going to be losing 45,000 guys per month. That's over 100,000 wounded and killed Russians by the time we come and talk again. So you tell me how you're doing in six months, given that you have a labor shortage of a billion people now, it's going to be even worse. So I think that's sort of the approach. And I don't know.

At the same time, the Russians are being intransigent about their own objectives. They have made the ceasefire for the Black Sea, the maritime domain ceasefire contingent on preliminary American sanctions relief, which should be a non-starter. I mean, there's really no reason to do it.

They want to have sanctions relief for some Russian import and export banks and people that work with agriculture, foodstuffs. It's just free butter for no reason, really. we really shouldn't be in the business of helping the Russians out in that regard. So, we'll see.

But I'm hopeful that President Trump will realize that his stated objectives, which in principle are good, that actually leads to a very natural conclusion, which is we got to keep the Ukrainians in the fight because the Russians got to back down from their non-starter demands.

I see it as a possibility to be explored. I mean, you could work with OPEC. I mean, that's what Ronald Reagan did back in the 80s is we worked with OPEC. drive down the price of oil, that in combination with the Russians losing a lot in their war in Afghanistan, those helped put in the final nails of the coffin of the Soviet Union.

So, I'm not going to say it's not possible, but what I will say is that the maximum pressure campaign that is necessary to get the Russians to back down is not achievable with economic tools alone. The main driver of the Russian pressure points are their losses in Ukraine. And so, we're going to talk about how do we get the Russians to a better spot.

The strategy has to... I think it should include economic instruments, like trying to bring down the price of oil, but that should be in addition to the sustained military support. Now, I remain hopeful that we could do it, especially if we can get the minerals deal signed, because then that could become a mechanism through which the Ukrainians are not the recipients of military aid for free.

but the minerals deal can then become a means of financing.

It's very interesting when you bring that up, when you especially mentioned that President Trump just a couple of weeks ago was talking about how he would like to have American personnel operating Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is in Russian occupied territory as well, which implied- negotiations or war fighting that has to come under pregnant and then American jurisdiction.

I'm not sure what the Trump administration is thinking about how that's optimal, but if we're a world where the Ukrainians and US Americans get some of those minerals and get Americans supporting defending Europe's largest nuclear power plant, and the Russians' front line goes closer to Russia and further away from mainland Ukraine, that's a win in my book. So we'll see. Sure.

Independently, just using the European defense industrial base, at this time, no. And the reason why is because, look, the Europeans have money. Money is not the issue, but a lot of it has to actually do with the manufacturing capacity. Europeans are doing a lot in recent years to augment their defense industrial base, but as is with all things European, too little too late.

And when you need a factory today, you need to start breaking ground on the factory three or four years ago. Yeah. And so the timelines aren't exactly lining up. Europeans are expediting it. I believe the European Commission, they're currently talking about a decades long European regarment initiative where they're going to spend somewhere around

800 billion euros to invest in the European defense industrial base. That's excellent. Again, needed to happen 10 years ago, but here we are. Now, that said, Europeans can do a lot. They produce a lot of artillery ammunition. They produce a lot of working good stuff. Rheinmetall can make armored fighting vehicles and tanks. So in principle, that stuff can get to Ukraine.

But there's some niche systems and capabilities that truly only the US has. that the Europeans cannot replicate. Two systems come to mind. The interceptors for the Patriot air defense system. Europeans themselves depend on the Patriots. It's kind of bizarre how the Americans have a monopoly over European air defense. The Ukrainians are running low on those.

The Europeans barely have any spare that they could give the Ukrainians that they haven't already. The American production rate of Patriot Interceptors is actually quite low too. And so, no more American aid, no more Patriot Interceptors, that's going to be a big problem for Ukraine. Number two is the HIMARS for their operational strike capacity. The Ukrainians rely on the HIMARS.

It has become a workhorse capability. It is the only system they have for reliable, effective operational range strikes, those being strikes beyond 30 kilometers, but short of 70, 75 kilometers. The Europeans do not have a commensurate mature system like the HIMARS to be able to fulfill that very important need.

So, even if the Europeans want to throw a lot of money and try to build up, they need that stuff. And the solution might be that the Europeans just go to the Americans and go to Robert Grumman and go to Lockheed and they're like, hey, we'll pay you at General Dynamics. They're like, hey, we'll pay you to give us the interceptors and the HIMARS ammo.

And then they'll give it to the Koreans that way, which in principle could work and would benefit the US industry too.

Right. So it seems like the Russians are in the beginning phases of their spring offensive.

It seems that they are currently trying to take the Russian forces in Northern Ukraine, the ones that were clearing out Kursk, where the Ukrainians were in Kursk and Russia, and they're trying to steamroll it across the international border into Sumy, and possibly into neighboring Northern Kharkiv oblasts in Ukraine. Now, candidly, Mike, I got to tell you, I'm not my...

My forecast is not particularly grim on this operation. The Russian forces that they have up there has not been significantly augmented from what they were operating with in Kursk. It's about ballpark 60 to 70,000 guys, so maybe six, seven divisions or so.

A lot of the same units that have been there for a long time, we've not indicated any redeployments of bringing in fresh troops that those forces that were tired fighting and expelling the Ukrainians from Kursk They're not going to have a lot of gusto and energy to keep going into Sumi.

So it seems like the Russians might try to do some pushes in the north and call that the spring of Benthev, but I don't see it going very far, to be honest, and they're certainly not going to take Sumi city. And that'd be kind of hard for the course. I mean, the Russians, winter of Benthev has concluded.

And the Russians failed with their winter offensive in Donbas to take their objective for the all 2024 offensive, which was taking Pokrovsk. So, I'm sure they're going to make some tactical gains. They're going to make some territorial gains. They'll get some villages and fields.

They might even get a couple of small towns and stuff, but they're not going to be making any operational breakthroughs, that's for sure. Okay.

Yeah. It's not that surprising really. The Russian fourth generation apparatus is very skilled at going to all corners of the Russian Federation and other countries as well and trying to seduce migrant workers, students, foreigners. both in Russia and outside of Russia, to come and volunteer in the Russian military.

Because the Russian military is just trying to suck up as many bodies as they can to meet that replacement quota for those casualties that they're taking. Lots of foreign nationals have made it into the Russian military. Sri Lankans, Indians, Venezuelans, Cubans, Africans.

These two Chinese guys that were captured by the Ukrainians, I reported there being at least a couple hundred in the ranks of the Russian military. That thought's surprising. I don't have any dispositive evidence, but it's my impression that those captured Chinese were not PLA soldiers. I would be astonished if they were deliberately sent by Beijing to go there.

It seems more likely that these were Chinese nationals located in Russia or in a Russian adjacent country who went to an office and voluntarily signed up to go get a paycheck for $40,000 or something. Here they are captured along with many other impoverished foreign nationals who have made the same bad decision.

I buy that there are many more Chinese, but I don't think that they're PLA. I know for you, this is interesting. Your listeners can look into this. Last year in 2023 or 2024, there was a massive scandal with India because there were several hundred, about thousands of Indian nationals that a Russian human trafficking scheme had recruited and into going to serve in the Russian military.

It became a massive international scandal. President Modi actually made a whole stink about it. The Indian foreign ministry formally went to the Russian foreign ministry and said, hey, quit it. Stop trying to recruit Indian nationals to go fight in the military. It was a whole public spat. It doesn't mean that the Indian government was sending Indians to go fight in Russia. Right.

But they're looking for a way out. Hundreds of thousands of Russians have been killed or wounded. There is widespread shortages of basic commodities. I mean, the price for butter is up by 25%. There are widespread egg shortages. Die Russen haben viel Geld. Das ist eigentlich Teil des Problems.

Die Russen sind flüssig mit Geld, weil jeder diese Ausgaben von der Regierung hat, um in die Ukraine zu kämpfen. Wir haben jetzt ein neues Rekord. Der Oblast von Samara gibt Ihnen 4 Millionen Rubel, etwa 36.000 US-Dollar, nur als ein einziger Sign-on-Bonus. Das ist fast viermal der übliche russische jährliche Betrag, nur in einem Sign-on-Bonus. Und das ist ein Problem.

Wenn du viel Geld hast, verursacht das die Preise, das verursacht die Inflation. Es erodert deine echte nationalen Werte. The Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund has been systematically chipped into to keep supporting and funding the Russian defense industrial base. And so really, the Russians, they're feeling the brunt of this war economically with their people, with their demographics.

And I would argue, especially for the incoming Trump administration, look, if we're going to cut a deal, We shouldn't try to cut a deal on day one or maybe within the first couple months.

Because the longer we protract this conflict and the longer we erode Russia's national wealth, we erode their demographic situation, we erode their Soviet-era tanks that they're burning through, the more likely you'll get a breakthrough.

On the battlefield tactically, with breaking the back of the Russian economy, or in the diplomatic arena, as Putin really wants to evade the nexus of these interconnected problems related to sustaining a long war.

They're eating into their sovereign wealth. So, the Russians have a sovereign wealth fund. Putin built it up in the 2000s when oil prices were high. Russia was really cashing out by selling a lot of crude oil. And the liquidity portion of Russia's sovereign wealth fund, it was about $122 billion in 2022 before the war. It's now down to $56 billion, the liquidity portion.

Und ich glaube, der russische öffentliche Budget-Deposit für 2024 hat etwa 60 Prozent von der Inflation ausgelöst. Und also, wirklich, sie brennen durch dieses Geld. Ich meine, all das Geld, das Russland für die ersten zwei Jahrzehnte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts geschaffen hat, Und das ist das Größte, was dieses Krieg finanziert hat.

Natürlich haben sie auch Fiat-Printing und sie können auch Geld printen, aber das hat einfach die Inflation erhöht. Und die russische Zentralbank hat momentan eine Lendungsrate von 21%. Ich meine, kannst du dir vorstellen, dass sie 21% haben? Das ist verrückt. Ja, ja.

Sie haben eine große Rolle gespielt. Ich meine, Russland hat von den Chinesen duale Nutzungskomponenten gekauft. Im Grunde alle ersten-Menschen-Drohnen von Russland, die die Chinesen benutzen, kommen aus China. Taktische Ausrüstung, Eifach-Kits, Körperarmor. Die Chinesen kaufen auch russische Gas.

Ohne China und chinesisches ökonomisches und politisches Unterstützung, obwohl sie noch nicht, zumindest wir können es in den Ökosourcen sehen, unabhängige militärische Unterstützung anbieten können, ist es ein wichtiger Alli. Ich meine, alle Alli von Russland, die ihre Arbeit unterstützt haben, waren wichtige Anbieter. The Iranians with the Shahed Drones has been a huge deal.

The North Koreans sending 10,000 troops and also now confirmed heavy artillery, self-propelled guns for the first time, now reaching the front lines of Ukraine, confirmed as of today. I mean, without these foreign partners, Russia would have probably gone broke earlier.

We see North Korean special forces and North Korean airport infantry being used as tactical dismounts. So they are operated without vehicle support. They are typically sent in storms and maybe platoon-sized groups to go run across fields and just anchor down and storm stuff.

Und die Ukrainer töten sie in Drohnen, aber sie haben auch versucht, ihre Maske zu benutzen, um taktische Objekte zu erreichen, Villen zu erzeugen, Felder zu erzeugen. Und das ist ein taktischer Erfolg, aber es ist vielleicht auch ein Parallelserfolg.

Also, sie werden nicht in irgendwelchen Spezialwaffen-Operationen, Rädern oder irgendwelchen komplexen kombinierten Angriffen oder Fahrzeugsupporten benutzt, aber es ist einfach mehr Maske für die Maschine. Und schau, wenn die Russen 10.000 Nordkoreaner auf eine regelmäßige Art und Weise bekommen, dann kann das bis zu einer Drittel ihrer monatlichen Verletzungen aufsetzen.

Und ich denke, es ist mein Ausdruck, dass Putin nicht die Ein-Zeit-Belieferung von nur 10.000 Nordkoreanern möchte. Er würde es gerne machen, eine regelmäßige Beitrag zu seinen gesamten Ressourcen.

He's getting money. He's also getting technologies that are sensitive. He's getting support with space-borne technologies, with satellite sensors. He's probably getting ballistic missile and advanced missile technology support. There's also been speculation that he might be getting submarine technology support as well.

And so what the Russians are doing here is they're giving cash and they're giving technology exchanges to really help the North Koreans achieve what North Korean military would like to achieve in their territory.

Because Putin is on a collision course with having to call another mobilization, with them running out of their Soviet-era tanks and armored personnel carriers by close to the end of this year, with Russian inflation and the erosion of their wealth becoming worse. And so what I would tell the future presidents, look, Putin has offered zero concessions.

Wenn man sich das, was er noch beantragt, anschaut, dann will er das originale Set der Anforderungen, die er hatte, als russische Truppen an den Türsteigen von Kiew waren, im März 2022. Und ich entschuldige mich, Mike, aber schau dir die moderne Map der Laufbahn an und schau dir an, wo das russische Militär jetzt ist. Er ist in keiner Position, diese hochloftigen Anforderungen zu beantragen.

In Wahrheit, wenn wir einen Deal verkaufen, sollte es einen Deal sein, der amerikanischen Interessen zutrifft. Und tatsächlich sollte es nicht uns sein, präemptive Konzessionen zu machen, sondern es sollte Putin sein, Konzessionen zu machen, um zu einem Deal zu kommen.

Und in Wahrheit würde ich argumentieren, dass, wenn Putin weiterhin diese Front aufbauen wird und ein aggressiver Negotiator sein wird, wie er es sollte, ich verstehe, warum er es macht, dann sollte der Präsident einfach sagen, okay, das ist großartig, ich sehe, dass wir nicht wirklich die Termine für einen Deal haben.

Let's see how you're doing in six months and then return after another, you know, 120,000 Russians are killed or wounded. Their wealth is that much more degraded. Their inflation gets that much worse and they come closer to running critically low on their Soviet tanks.

Absolut. Ich meine, die imperfekte Analyse ist, dass wir einen late 80er, einen 1989er-Szenario schauen, in dem die Sowjetunion wie diese unglaubliche Schmerze aussieht. Ich meine, Sie hatten letztens eine Krieg in Afghanistan und sie finanzieren insurgente Gruppen in Südamerika und Afrika und anderswo.

But really, if you look at all the indicators for how is the Soviet economy performing at home, how are people doing at home, is the Russian defense industrial base actually sustainable? And then all of a sudden, when you do the post-mortem, when it suddenly breaks down in a sort of dramatic and unpredictable way, you realize that all of the indicators one could collect about

Soviet life, about Soviet economy, about how the internal organs were functioning, was quite poor. And I see parallels similarly that actually despite the messages that Putin puts out there launching these international, or pardon me, intermediate range ballistic missiles in Ukraine recently and all this stuff,

Having to go to the North Koreans and the Chinese and the Iranians and the Houthis for basic support, I mean, this is actually an indication of weakness and we got to keep it to the fire.

Also, schau, am Sonntag, am 5. Januar, haben die Ukrainer die Offensiv-Operationen in der Kursk-Salient über die internationale Grenze innerhalb Russlands beendet. Das ist die erste Zeit, dass die Ukrainer auf der Offensiv-Operation sind, wirklich seit dem Sommer 2024. Für die letzten mehrere Monate sind die Russen auf der Offensiv-Operation gegangen und langsam die ukrainischen Schmerzen entfernt.

Was ich so weit sagen möchte, ist, dass dieser Angriff ziemlich klein geworden ist. Wir beurteilen, dass es ungefähr die Größe einer Battalion war. Vielleicht haben wir zwei, drei, vielleicht vier ukrainische Unternehmen gesehen, aber es ist tatsächlich ziemlich, ziemlich klein. In den ersten 24 Stunden des Offensivs konnten die Ukrainer taktisch wechseln.

Sie haben ihre Linien sehr, sehr klein gesteigert. Sie sind in ein Dorf namens Berdyn gekommen. In der letzten Zeit, die das durchgeführt hat, scheint es so zu sein, dass die Russen die Angriffe so far erfolgreich verteidigt haben. Sie haben die Berdynen berücksichtigt und sie haben die Ukrainer zurückgepumpt. Aber es ist noch nicht ganz vorbei.

Russische Kräfte und Ressourcen erläutern, dass die Ukrainer uns eigentlich nur die Eröffnung einer größeren Operation zeigen werden. Und die Russen spekulieren darüber, dass dies eine Testanlage für eine größere Operation in Kursk oder sogar in einem Theater in der Ukraine sein könnte, wie in Donetsk oder in der südlichen Frontlinie.

Was auch immer passiert, würde ich es wirklich nicht nennen, eine massive Operation. Ich meine, es ist eine taktische Operation. Am besten war es ein battallionsgeheizter Angriff. Es hat die Linien nicht viel verändert. Es scheint, dass die Russen die Ukrainer so weit zurückgezogen haben, von dem, was wir betrachten.

Und es führt uns wirklich zu der Frage, was die ukrainische Intention mit dieser Operation sein könnte.

Ich möchte nicht zu viel spekulieren und vielleicht die Operation der Ukraine überraschen, aber ich sehe ein paar interessante Patterns. The Ukrainians tested out some interesting tactics for this attack. They successfully blanketed the Kursk area of operations with electronic warfare interference on the EW spectrum, the electromagnetic spectrum.

And that degraded Russians forces ability to use these remotely piloted first person view attack drones to engage Ukrainian vehicles. Wir sahen die Ukrainer in diesen kleinen mechanisierten Platoons mit vielleicht fünf bis sechs Fahrzeugen, ein paar Tanks hier und da.

Und sie haben es geschafft, in die Felder zu kommen, dass diese FPV-Drohnen typisch ziemlich kapabel sind, Reconnoitering und Zerstörung.

What we also saw is combined efforts to include Ukrainian HIMARS and long-range strikes to interdict Russian rear areas to prevent redeployments, to take out Russian command posts, while the Ukrainians were also conducting the DW interference and the ground attack.

So, it looked sort of like a combined operation or a combined attack, where you had multiple different service branches supporting a ground maneuver, and for what it's worth, it seemed to move.

Das ist interessant, weil wir wissen, dass die ukrainischen größeren Konteroffensiven der Vergangenheit, insbesondere die Sommer-2023-Konteroffensive im Süden und Zaporizia, nicht erfolgreich waren, weil diese Ukrainer keine Möglichkeit hatten, eine gut vorbereitete defensive Linie zu brechen, v.a. weil die Russen Really strong defenses. They had the ability to use drones.

And so the requirement for how to restore maneuver to the battlefield is actually how do you get the ground forces, the guys riding in the infantry personnel carriers to actually interact with the electronic defense guys to take out the Russian drones, but not your friendly drones. And then how do you integrate the long range strike capabilities into that as well?

And it seems that the Ukrainians might be experimenting wie man eine Überraschung erreichen kann und sich taktisch bewegen kann, wenn man mit diesen komplementären Effekten kombiniert. Aber wir werden sehen. Okay.

Absolut. Die Russen haben die Initiative über die gesamte Ostukraine. Die Russen haben gegriffen und sie haben sehr intensiv gegriffen in der letzten Quartal, Ende 2024. Aber die russischen Angriffe wurden im September und Oktober aufgenommen. Die Russen, zum Beispiel, die Krasnoyarske Theater, sie hatten im Übrigen ca. 30.000 Verletzungen pro Monat.

Aber im Oktober, November, Dezember, da kam es zu ca. 40.000-45.000 Verletzungen. Also versuchten sie wirklich hart zu drücken. However, in December slowed the rate of Russian advance in eastern Ukraine down. It was already fairly slow to begin with.

I mean, we're talking about the Russians taking a year to cross about 50 kilometers of fields and losing five armored divisions in the process of doing so. But it's been slowing down. And I'm not yet prepared to say that the Russian-grade defensive in eastern Ukraine that's been going on for the last year has culminated. But they're getting closer to it.

The Russians have not notably seized the operationally significant town of Pokrovsk. The defenses there have held up so far so good. Over the course of the year, the Ukrainians have managed to also hold the other tactically important town of Chasubyar, which is defending the flank of the operationally important town of Konstantinivka.

And Russian forces have been losing a tremendous amount of combat power at rates that are just not sustainable.

I mean, if you look at these rates and you think about Russia's ability to continue at this tempo of operations to push forward for other 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, particularly with the vehicle losses, which are very hard to replace, it makes us think that, look, Putin really is kind of on a nice edge, because if we continue to sustain the Ukrainians in this fight, the Russian tank is just going to run out of gas eventually.

I think our current running assessment based off of Ukrainian figures estimates that in 2024, the Russians lost a little bit north of 400,000 killed and wounded casualties. And when you aggregate that across the amount of square kilometers, also a little bit north of 4,000 square kilometers that the Russians gained,

Das Net-Average beträgt ungefähr 103 Verletzungen pro Kilometer pro Quadratmeter, was ziemlich schrecklich und ziemlich schrecklich ist. Manchmal hören wir diese Narrative, dass die Russen 140 Millionen Menschen haben. Es ist egal, wie viele Menschen du tötest, die Russen werden nur noch mehr schicken. Und das ist einfach nur ein Mythos, das ist nicht wahr. Die Menschen sind eine finite Ressource.

Und was wir jetzt in Russland sehen, ist, dass Putin tatsächlich die Hilfe der Wirtschaft verursacht. um seine Fördergeneration in der Ukraine zu gewährleisten. Die russischen Leute können sich in Uniform in der Ukraine bewerben, oder sie können in ihrem Zuhause in der domestischen Wirtschaft arbeiten, die GDP für ihre Nation produzieren.

Aber du kannst sowohl nicht gleichzeitig, wenn du getötet oder beschädigt bist, auch nicht. Die Russen haben momentan eine Lever-Deposit von ca. 1 Millionen Leuten. Das sind Leute, die nicht arbeiten können. Und so lange sie 30.000 bis 40.000 Menschen pro Monat verlieren,

That's even fewer workers to be able to go and support the Russian economy and let alone sustain, you know, killed and wounded veterans families.

Killed and wounded combination. You typically would expect a three to one casualty or wounded to kill ratio, but together that's the total cash to count. Look, he's probably going to have to call mobilization at some point. I think it's a question of time. But even if he calls mobilization, it's not a perfect solution because you're just going to be robbing Peter to pay Paul.

You're going to have to take people from the factories, from civil services, from a variety of things within Russia that will not be able to contribute to the Russian economy. Und die russische Ökonomie macht es gerade sehr schlecht.

Ich meine, Wladimir Putin kann die Verantwortung für viele seiner politischen Entscheidungen auslösen, indem er einen Minister oder einen Gouverneur oder einen General beurteilt. He cannot do that for mobilization. I mean, there are a lot of things he can shirk, but as president of the Russian Federation, calling mobilization is uniquely his.

And it's actually the reason why he is uniquely unwilling to make that decision. It's sort of the decision of last resort. But I view it as an inevitability and a question of time at the current tempo.

Schau, es gibt im Grunde zwei gute polling-Agenzien in Russland, die unabhängig sind. Und die polling-Daten zeigen, dass die russischen Leute immer weniger bereit sind, Putins Krieg zu unterstützen. Sie werden natürlich versuchen, das zu tun, weil sie in einem tiefen autoritären Staat leben. Und der übrige Russisch hat nicht wirklich die Fähigkeit, die Autoritäten zu stellen.