Bonus: Is There an Endgame in Ukraine?

26:11Like how much time it took to set up the whole security assistance enterprise, training, logistics, and to build this pipeline. This was a significant part of Western efforts in 2022, right? And you had to build it in order to be able to do it. Sometimes folks think, well, why couldn't we just transfer an entire brigade's worth of stuff to the Ukrainian military? And the short answer is, the way I put it is, look, if you could build a bridge in three days, then you'd have a bridge in three days. And the only problem is that you can't, right? Things aren't built that way, right? So some of the historical counterfactuals fail because they simply don't appreciate the practical constraints.

26:45At Munich last weekend, there were lots of Biden officials sitting in the audience, as Zelensky spoke, bristling at the criticism. And they similarly went to that 2023 counteroffensive and I think echoed the Zaluzhny criticism that Ukraine failed to kind of concentrate forces in the right way. And then they also, of course, pointed to what they saw as a serious risk of nuclear use by Russia in fall 2023 if Russian lines had collapsed. Do you see some validity to their view there? I mean, would you have urged the Ukrainians to concentrate their forces there? And did you assess the nuclear risk as real as you observed it from where you sit in fall 2023?

27:27So if we go back to fall 2022, I think that was a genuine nuclear crisis. and I don't necessarily think the risk was that high because the conditions were never met. Ultimately, Russian mobilization served to stabilize their lines and they were able to withdraw from Kursun. So we never got to a point where it was likely Russia might use nuclear weapons. But I do think that there's more to it and it tends to be underplayed. That said, it didn't drive anything in US policy. So it's not like the United States in any way affected Ukrainian operations during that time. Things played out the way they did because of the situation on the ground.

28:05I myself was in Kyrgyzstan in October of 2022 when I saw it. The second point on the criticism of Biden administration during summer 2020 offensive, yeah, there were recriminations about, okay? My view was that we could have done a lot better, but ultimately the concept of operations was unworkable from the outset for that offensive operation. I think a lot of things it would have needed were missing. And I think that the big choice on distribution of forces and fires. And the decision to continue an offensive, even though it clearly failed all the way up till November, was ultimately Ukraine's.

28:36And that's a conversation for Ukrainians to have amongst themselves. And they're increasingly having that conversation. I do think that what happened in this war, right, is the result of both Ukrainian effort and Western effort and supports, right? And so when you want to have a nuanced historical retrospective, you have to account for the fact that both the successes and the failures have to be jointly owned to some extent. And that it's hard to select for which was the most causal factor for a very simple reason. Outcomes in war tend to be multi-causal. I'm very wary of anybody that points to a single cause for any outcome in a conventional war session as this.

29:17And it's not easy to say which had the most significant effect. We'll be back after a short break. What if you could explore places in the news like a reporter does? I'm Nicholas Wood, a former journalist with the New York Times and BBC. And 16 years ago, I created the travel company Political Tours. Our small groups are led by top correspondents around the world. In the next few months, we're off to Mexico, followed by South Africa, Japan and the French presidential elections. Come and join us. Go to politicaltours.com. That's politicaltours.com. This September, Independent 20th Century presents more than 130 artists at the legendary Broyu building at 945 Madison Avenue.

30:05The show will fill four floors of the modernist landmark on Museum Mile. See why Art News Magazine calls Independent 20th Century a staple of the season and experience historic modern art from around the world and one of New York's most iconic spaces, September 24th to 27th. To learn more, visit IndependentHQ.com. This July, save$10 on an all-access subscription to Foreign Affairs. Get exclusive access to thought-provoking analysis by the world's leading policymakers, scholars, and thinkers. Join the global conversation on the issues that matter most. Visit foreignaffairs.com slash July to subscribe.

30:43That's foreignaffairs.com slash J-U-L-Y.

30:53And now back to my conversation with Michael Kaufman. In the new piece, you stress that the kind of key factor at this moment is how each side manages to endure and to exhaust the other. As you look at the Ukrainian side, where are the areas of weakness? And if you worry about Ukraine's ability to endure, where do you see cause for real concern? So I think the long-running challenge for Ukraine has been first and foremost manpower, challenges with force generation and a force whose combat strength is diminished on the front. Ukraine has compensated with drone units using technology and better tactics and essentially the fact that their force is qualitative better than the Russian military to offset that.

31:40But the war remains manpower intensive. Drone warfare is manpower intensive. and at the end of the day you need to focus on force generation and also force management right i think force management is another command and control above the level of brigade you know the ukrainian military is largely a brigade oriented military and for a long time had struggled to cohesively organize the effort above that of brigades who would often horizontally integrate the fight but you know beyond that it wasn't nearly that well coordinated last year they They created cores, which is starting to lead to significant improvement in how this effort is organized.

32:15But still, Ukrainian military tends to be very micromanaged from the top. And you essentially see a clash of culture, right? Bottom-up innovation, mission command at the battalion level and below, and also senior leadership that basically sets a whole policy, such as if you need to change your positions, you need approval from higher command. Or folks can't run a mobile defense because they're not allowed to withdraw from whatever they're defending. even if the geometry of the battlefield is really unfavorable, these sort of things. You know, the only other one I would say is Russia has really expanded a strike campaign against Ukraine over the last two years.

32:50And you saw a near exponential increase in the volume of strike capabilities and drones are employed. That affects quite a bit. It's not just driving people out of cities necessarily or affecting critical infrastructure, particularly availability of electricity over the course of this winter. It also affects defense industrial production because that too requires electricity. And so this aspect of the fight is important to keep in mind. And so Ukraine's often been on sort of two treadmills, right? One is focused on the ground force, munitions, manpower, that have you, and one is focused on air defense and adapting to the evolving Russian strike campaign.

33:26Western air defense is primarily used against Russian ballistic missiles. There's high-end capabilities like Patriots, what have you, and Russian cruise missiles. Ukraine has worked to expand the use of interceptor drones to deal with the Russian one-way attack drones threat, which is the bulk of the Russian strike packages. And I describe a bit of that in the article. But essentially, that fight is a big part of what's happening in the war. It is striking. I haven't been to Ukraine in a couple of years. And when you talk to people and even in Kyiv and in other cities, there does seem to be a real kind of weariness this winter as they deal with, you know, freezing temperatures and almost no heat and electricity.

34:07That does seem like a, you know, not totally implausible theory of success for Putin, that you'll just have enough Ukrainians that get through this winter and just say they can't do it again without some kind of assurance that air defenses will improve. I mean, is that reading wrong? And as you look at the technical side of this, are there any innovations that you see coming on the Ukrainian side that might prevent the effectiveness of these kinds of missile and drone barrages next winter? So I think that this winter is a particularly cold one, and that's a big part of the problem for Ukraine.

34:39The last two were rather warm winters and has a real impact on how ultimately effect of the Russian strike campaign is. Despite all the hardships, Ukraine has proved remarkably resilient. And actually, if a Russian strike campaign isn't able to substantially affect Ukraine this winter in the sense that, yes, people are struggling. Yes, in cities like Kiev, you basically have, they've had days where there's only one and a half to two hours of electricity and heating available. That may be true. But if folks get through this winter, then it's a real question of what is put in the theory of how he's going to further break ukraine's will because i don't really see it happening just because it hasn't happened in practice and to be frank bombardment actually has a very weak track record of achieving significant political outcomes for the country that's not able to actually advance or achieve any kind of breakthroughs on the ground, right?

35:37Meaning, strike bombardment strategy is a fairly weak substitute for inability to break the deadlock on the battlefield, and historically has not played out well. In fact, I tend to have a fairly dim view of bombardment against Sicilian infrastructure as sort of the alternative. I don't think it's going to work for Russia. Historically, it's not worked for a lot of countries, although plenty of people have tried it, thinking, well, maybe it'll work for us. And on the manpower front, do you see mobilization debates evolving in a way that it will address those? Or is that just kind of a hard constraint that's going to be a struggle for Ukrainians indefinitely?

36:17I think it's going to be a struggle for Ukraine throughout this war. I don't think it's ever going to be something that gets resolved. What I do think Ukraine can do is get much better at force management, at organizational forces and with what they do with the people they have. I don't just think that they think that. And they can get much better also tackling the AWOL problem, the absent without leak problem, which substantially saps the strength of Ukrainian units. Folks who think that, look, you can just use technology and have nobody on the front lines at all, I think are mistaken. And they forget that a lot of this technology is rather manpower intensive.

36:55and that ultimately you can't have a battlefield of just drones. If you do, you have a big issue. If somebody listening is saying, well, why not? Because you're selecting for only one advantage. And if the last year has shown that that advantage can be taken away by the opposing force, that you could lose it, then you might end up in a very bad place, right? Because you essentially have a single point of failure where only one part of your force is actually doing all the lifting. And if the other side does better in quality and quantity, then that could have a very negative impact down the line.

37:31The big challenge the Russian military has is, despite having improved in drone employment and despite in several categories of drones substantially outproducing Ukraine, they are not able to capitalize or take advantage of those developments last year. The way they are fighting and the issues that they have within their own force are such, that they're not in the position to turn that and convert that into a significant breakthrough. So Ukraine is still able to hold them to incremental gains. At least that's been the story for 2025. But I want folks to listen to appreciate that we tend to extrapolate from the last phase of the war.

38:06The one thing we know is that things are going to change. And also wars are kind of unstable systems, right? They're gradually then suddenly transitions. So this is a conversation, assuming all things being equal, but who knows what the fighting will look like three or six months down the line. What about Russian staying power in a war of endurance? If you look at the, you note in the article, the pretty serious manpower concerns that Russia has. And then of course the economic strain, I think, you know, one lesson of every recent history is that big economies can endure that kind of strain longer than we think, but it still does look pretty grave.

38:42How do you assess the the chances of just kind of Russia being unable to really sustain this kind of offensive going forward? So looking at the military and economy, on the one hand, I don't see something that will sort of tell us, okay, the Russian economy is going to collapse this year, or suddenly the Russian military won't be able to sustain the war this year. But I see a whole bunch of indicators that tell us time is increasingly not on Russia's side in this war, and that the war had hit the point of diminishing returns for Russia, probably end of 2024, to be honest, if we reflect on 2025, for a couple of reasons.

39:11First, yes, they were able to substantially reduce loss of equipment by instead fighting in a way that leads to much higher losses of manpower. Increasingly, their manpower advantage that they have had is running into a trend line that tells us they will not run out of people, but they will have difficulty sustaining the same pace of offensive operations this year as they did last year, unless something changes significantly in terms of Russian combat loss of recruitment. This is the first issue, right? The way they are fighting is not leading to greater combat efficiency. It's not leading to greater gains at lower costs.

39:48It's not achieving significant breakthroughs on the battlefield. And so increasingly, it looks like this year might be more of the same from last year. And if that's the case, I think it actually bodes very poorly for our objectives. Remember, Russia is the attacking side. It is a side that has the burden of defensive operations. And it's a side that's trying to take territory. Second, if we look at economic indicators, well, so most of Russia are negative. Russia is facing economic stagnation. It is particularly negatively affected by low oil prices, and it's forced to offer significant discounts on oil sales to countries like China.

40:26It is facing regional budgetary crisis, and that's quite relevant if you look at recruitment and contract bonuses they have to give to troops. increasingly the Russian military is seeing a slowdown in industrial production of any goods other than military and military production itself is slowing down or leveling off a bit too going into this year and it's a real question how long can they sustain budgetary outlays of 40 % of the government budget being spent on this war at about 8 % of GDP sure it could be for the rest of 2026. But the truth is that the country will increasingly be at risk of external shock and crises.

41:04And there's not a great story for Moscow to tell about what things look like if they're able to simply carry the war from 2026 to 2027, meaning nothing improves for Russia if we look over the course this year, not from an economic point of view, not really from a manpower equipment availability point of view either. The other change in policy is in Elon Musk's policy. There were reports early in the war that he was restricting Ukrainian use of Starlink terminals. There have been more recent reports that he's restricting Russian use. Is that a significant change? Is that a meaningful restraint on Russian action?

41:39It is. We've yet to see the full effect. So there's three things it's going to impact. First, Russian use of strike journals of any kind that were starting to use mini Starlink terminals. Second, Russian use of UGVs, anchor ground vehicles. This is one area where Ukraine has led in substantially to offset their battlefield losses in the rear. And most of these use Starlink terminals, right? It's the cheapest way to enable communications for UGVs. Russia had started to also expand use of UGVs, but again, using Starlink terminals. There are some ways they can adapt using various types of Wi-Fi bridges and relays, but it essentially eliminates a very easy solution for them to enable the use of these types of drones.

42:22But the most important one is organization of communications command and control at the tactical level. Russian force were not as dependent on Starlink as the Ukrainian military. They adopted it much later. But as they came to adopt it, particularly the last couple of years, they naturally became more dependent on it. And if you look at the combined effect of both having Starlink use cut off and having them to then employ other means of communications that may have lower data bandwidth or much harder to set up or being much less portable or easy to deploy. On top of that, Russian leadership itself had chosen to sabotage their military by starting to throttle Telegram, a messenger service that many folks here might be familiar with, to try to push them onto a different platform.

43:06And so you see sort of a combination of these effects that will disrupt Russian command and control. Is the Russian military going to adapt? Yes. but is it going to affect latency in how they organize strike in their situational awareness? Most likely. We just don't see, don't know what the full impact will be down the line. And it's definitely going to affect their ability to employ certain types of drones. Setting aside your skepticism about the viability of the prospects of negotiations in the near term, as you look at some of the key dimensions of those discussions thus far, I'm curious how you read both the kind of prospects and the consequences of some of what's being talked about.

43:44I guess the The first is territory. Zelensky still says he's not going to hand over the parts of Donbass that Ukrainians still hold. And that seems to be a kind of core demand of Putin and something the Trump administration has endorsed at various points. How costly would it be to hand over that territory? In the reporting, there's talk of kind of line of fortifications and that it would be, in fact, militarily quite consequential. But as you look at the kind of territorial dimension of this, what do you see as the right things to focus on? Yeah, I see that the defensive importance of Donetsk or what's currently left of it in Ukraine control is far less the issue.

44:21I think it's a bit overemphasized because of the political cost of handing over any territory to Russia. And I understand why Zdynitsky wouldn't want to do it and wouldn't agree to it. And is essentially demanding a national referendum. I have no idea how that referendum would pan out. I'm not sure anybody does. Yes, there have been polls, to be clear. But look, polls show one thing, and then people vote a different way. So just to be honest about it, you never know. People will always answer one way because sometimes they feel they're supposed to answer a certain way. But you don't know how people ultimately vote on a peace deal.

44:57I think Trump administration sees this very simplistically as a land for security guarantees deal. The war is about much more than just land or Donetsk. And so it's not going to be just a land for security guarantees deal. I do think that their pressure is serving as a catalyst ultimately to advance the negotiations. I don't agree with people who see this as just performative. However, I think we're still quite far away from a deal and a settlement. The situation on the ground isn't one that would lend either party to right now sign a deal that they think is disadvantageous. Secondarily, it's still quite far apart.

45:28The biggest issue I see in negotiations, ultimately this war will have some kind of ceasefire agreement or some kind of settlement. The biggest issue I see right now is that it's a problem with both a Russia-Ukraine end to it, a Russia-U.S. part to it, a U.S.-Ukraine part to it, and kind of a Europe-Ukraine part to it. There's a lot of moving pieces of who gives security guarantees to whom, who deploys or doesn't deploy a security assistance force, right? What is the agreement between Russia and Ukraine? What does Russia potentially get that they want from the United States? example, there's clear conversation on restoration of economic ties or lifting of sanctions as part of a deal.

46:10And the biggest issue I see is actually sequencing. And this may seem like the boring part of the conversation, but it's very important. Yes, there is a likelihood that a deal will be made. The question is, what is the likelihood that this deal will be implemented? Because that's the story of the Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 agreement. And often the folks who just want to get a deal and get to a deal don't spend enough time thinking through, will the sequencing work or is it too complicated of who has to deliver what to whom. If you're just thinking about a deal over Donetsk where both parties withdraw, I'll give you an example of a likely debate.

46:40Should there be a ceasefire first before a withdrawal? If there's a referendum to be voted on, one side will demand a ceasefire, right? So the other side would have to agree with a ceasefire for them to hold a referendum, okay? Or does the United States have to offer Ukraine security guarantees first, then Ukraine considers this deal on withdrawing from Donetsk, or is it the other way around? which goes first okay so there's a whole host of sequencing issues you have to resolve and often implementation collapse and sequencing and also the failure to follow through on things will reveal who's negotiating bad faith i have my own strong assumptions about who's negotiating bad faith and will be revealed to be negotiating bad faith in this war because the history and that is pretty clear and i think that that will also come through in any deal that's made and so to me the much bigger issue is the sequencing of it.

47:29The fact that you could get a deal, Trump administration could walk away and say, we made a deal to end the war, but it's actually not implemented. And we end up in a situation of sort of neither war nor peace, and essentially awaiting a renewal of hostilities. Would that advantage Russia or Ukraine? Would that pause be more costly to one of the sides? It would, in many respects, advantage Russia, I think. Because if you think about people coming back to ukraine restoration of investment um if you think about the importance of this kind of deal potentially for ukraine for ukraine's economic future it would affect russia because while ukrainian military is ultimately mobilized and you know you could keep folks at the front line for some period of time but eventually they too will want to demobilize and return to civilian life and so to some extent it would advantage russia certainly in the near terminal when a deal is made, right?

48:23It's difficult to say years down the line who it would advantage if, you know, Russia doesn't relaunch the war, but certainly in the near terminal will advantage Russia. And that's why Ukraine is so concerned. What's the point of signing a deal that's not worth the paper it's on, that Russia might break not long thereafter when they have a significant advantage over the Ukrainian military and when the United States has turned its attention elsewhere and basically decided that this is a problem solved? What about the security guarantee side of this, we've seen in the past several months, some pretty expansive versions of security guarantees put on the table by both the Americans and the Europeans with significant European troops there and American, you know, Article 5-like security guarantees.

49:05What exactly that means is a separate question. I was struck, you know, again, in Munich that you'd hear Europeans, you know, European policymakers say in private, well, do you really think that, you know, Europe's going to go to war with Russia, NATO countries are going to go to war with Russia over the Donbass, which indicated to me there was more skepticism there than appears to be in the headlines. How do you assess the prospect of real security guarantees coming into force as you've watched these discussions? So it seems like we have moved quite a bit on security guarantees being offered from the United States to Ukraine, maybe an executive and or legislative type of agreement.

49:42There won't quite be a treaty, but it functionally will have, functionally will be a fairly significant political commitment. Europeans are putting together kind of this coalition of the willing security assistance force. And the big question is, are they actually going to do it? Are they faking it to make it or faking it to fake it to stay in the conversation? The security guarantees in their respects are security commitments. It's a package, right? And it's more like a term of art, the way I see politicians discuss it, which is how these things usually end up coming to fruition, right? It's a commitment of sustained financial support for Ukraine and for Ukraine's military.

50:17It's a commitment of steady provision of capabilities and munitions to them as well after the war, some kind of military presence, and a clear contingency that if the ceasefire is broken, what the United States and other Western countries might do in that event, so Ukraine doesn't feel like it's completely left in the lurch once it signs up to any agreement. There's questions abound on, okay, is this a part of the actual deal with Russia? Is anybody going to ask the Russian opinion on this? It's clear that most folks believe that this can only be done once a ceasefire is agreed. Okay. This is where the conversation on security assistance force.

50:59I continue to raise the issue of sequencing, which I'm not clear on. What happens first? Do we offer guarantees? Does Ukraine vote on the deal? And then also then who signs the deal? there's increasing information in the news that the United States wants Ukraine to hold elections. Zansky might want to hold elections and have a simultaneous vote on the deal because it's his best chance of potentially being reelected as a wartime president. How does all that come together? I'm sorry if I have, in some respects, more questions than answers, but it's clear, though, that this has been worked on since the fall and that the negotiations have advanced quite a bit, Both between the United States and Ukraine and between Europeans and Ukraine and us and Europeans, right?

51:43There's also the question of do we offer the European force a backstop, even though there'll be, let's say, no U.S. boots on the ground. Lastly, on to what extent they're serious or credible. Well, if they are real commitments, right, from both executive and legislative branches, they are significant. Ultimately, they're as credible as you believe that Donald Trump, as the current president of the United States, would act on them in defense of Ukraine. But they are commitments. They are commitments that carry reputational costs. And lastly, they're as credible as people then make decisions to show that they're credible.

52:21Are forces deployed? Are there plans developed to support Ukraine? Or is this a piece of paper that didn't have much behind them? At the end of the day, 30 years later. Yeah. Yeah. But also, look, with respect to NATO Article 5 guarantees, NATO Article 5 doesn't say all that much, to be perfectly honest. It says that states individually and collectively will provide military aid to the party. It doesn't say what that assistance has to be, what form it takes. And there is a reason why we have operational plans, why we have forward deployed NATO battle groups in Baltic countries, because just that guarantee in an alliance is not enough.

53:02You also have to do the rest. That's why throughout the Cold War, we had a large U.S. military presence in Europe with regular exercise like Reforger to show that the U.S. was planning and committed to move forces to Europe in the event of a Soviet attack. So this is one of the challenges I often have as someone who spends their time doing defense analysis is that the folks who want to issue security guarantees will often do that. And then not necessarily think through the planning side of, right? Are there going to be U.S. forces in Europe to do that? Because to some extent, what I think Trump administration wants to do right now is a little bit contradictory.

53:39They want to download the U.S. military commitment to Europe while uploading the U.S. potential security commitment to Ukraine. And you can't have both from my point of view. And their belief that that's fine because they'll just have Europeans do more of it. Europeans are not in a position to take this over from the United States. They're not in a position to take this over from the United States for themselves. And they're not in a position to take this over from the United States for Ukraine either. So meaning, aspirationally, it's good to motivate European allies to make the right choice of investments, to be in a position, to be able to manage European security and take the lead on that.

54:17But they're not there yet. the deal on Russia-Ukraine war, look, if it doesn't happen this year, it's a good chance it may happen next year, but it's going to happen much sooner than European capability arrives to manage this problem on their own. I think that is 100 % a fair assessment. I want to, before we close, come back to this idea of theory of success that you mentioned earlier. From a Ukrainian perspective, what is the most optimistic, plausible scenario for the next year? I think make the war effectively futile for Russia, right? By that, I mean effectively leverage their advantages to stabilize the front, hold the Russian military to incremental gains, right?

54:56Increase Russian casualties as part of the solution beyond the recruitment ability, but also increasingly try to control operational depth and regain superiority in the drone engagement zone. Scale the current solutions they've already deployed to deal with Russian strikes to Ukraine, protecting critical infrastructure, and increased their own strike campaign against Russian energy export infrastructure in order to increase the cost for Russia. And together, Western countries increase economic pressure on Russia such that the main limiting factor for Russia's ability to sustain the war increasingly comes to the fore in Russian decision-making over the course of this year.

55:36I think that this is feasible. and again i think ukraine is seeking an acceptable end to the war where much of the rest they hope to gain at the negotiating table and not necessarily through one negotiation or singular negotiation and that what you saw last year's substantial narrowing of ukraine's political aims relative to military means and what's possible one that still leaves ukraine i think in a fairly good position uh if this war ends with prospects in the future right with the caveat that you stressed earlier that we can't know what sharp turns we'll see in the war in the coming months.

56:13You know, you describe in the piece, the war is one of both sides struggling to break out of the prevailing battlefield dynamic. Do you see technological or tactical innovations that might shift the balance dramatically in Ukraine's favor or against it? I think that for Ukraine, first, there are a host of technologies that the West could still transfer and provide Ukraine that will substantially enable Ukraine's own domestic production, special strike capabilities. I do see there are technological developments that can allow Ukraine to regain control of operational depth on this battlefield. I don't see anything that are necessarily game changers, but just to be clear, I have a strong bias that there are no real game changers in a conventional war.

56:55The things that are game changers are ultimately the result of changes in operational concepts and force structure and organizational capacity. It's not just the technology that gets employed. It's how you employ it and how the force organize around its employment. And those take time to develop. They're not things that just show up overnight. Most things that are treated as game changers, they provide a limited advantage for a particular operation. They can enable operational success, but then they drive cycles of adaptation and outside develop counters. So it's very hard to find a singular kind of game changer.

57:28To me, this is a very superficial way of looking at warfare. But I definitely think that there's a number of things Ukraine could do this year that could allow it to, in the areas, regain advantage and ultimately make the war much more futile for Russia. But if you're looking at Western capabilities, look, I think that there are unfortunately real limitations in Western stocks and Western defense industrial production that folks need to be cognizant of and understand that I don't see the United States or other countries providing a lot more. But I do see them providing more of certain type of boutique capabilities that can certainly help Ukraine over the course of this year.

58:09And lastly, a lot of it comes down to how the force is used. There are certain things Ukraine's been doing. Let's take expanding an unrestricted warfare campaign against the Russian shadow fleet, both in the Black Sea and outside the Black Sea, that can potentially affect Russian incomes. Increasingly, this war has become more regionalized, if you look over the past year, in terms of Ukrainian activity and also Russian activity. and Russian activity against NATO countries and then their airspace. So I do see potential developments that could change things. I also, though, see that both sides have consistently adapted to each other's approach and have struggled to really change the prevailing dynamic in this war.

58:58I suppose we should consider the flip side as well if we're having this similar conversation a year from now and things have gone unexpectedly badly for Ukraine or unexpectedly well for Russia, what would that plausible disastrous course look like? Yeah, so, I mean, look, there's a lot you can't tell from just looking at how territory changes hands. These are lagging indicators. There's many things you don't see what's happening within the two forces, right? That's part of the reason I do fieldwork in Ukraine and travel there every couple of months. And even then, you're still seeing really much more one side of the equation than the other.

59:31So there's always things to account for, right? that one side might have a more successful offensive operation than you might expect, one side is weaker than you might expect, that there could be a cascade effect or a ripple effect, let's say disabling Starlink for Russian forces, could have much greater effect on their command and control than we anticipate. That's a possibility. Let's say Russia's strike campaign against Ukraine might hobble Ukrainian defense industrial production more than we know now, because of the choice between powering homes and cities versus producing capabilities you need.

1:00:07The country's obviously going to choose one over the other. We don't know how that's going to play out. And also there's lots of external shocks and external factors that we don't account for. I'll give you an example. Let's say the United States in the next couple of weeks launches a sustained strike campaign against Iran, and that consumes a lot of U.S. munitions and efforts and diverts them from Russia and Ukraine. Or leadership in the Pentagon decides that it should, okay? Because other wars, other conflicts will not wait for your work to finish, right? And they can substantially affect both U.S.

1:00:41attention and the extent to which U.S. prioritizes the Russia-Ukraine war. That's a possibility. There are economic shocks and events that could happen that could substantially affect the Russian economy as well, which is quite vulnerable to them, right? It could affect prices for oil and energy. There are things that the West could do, for example, to really go after the Russian shadow fleet that would really cramp Russian revenue generation from exports. So there's a number of things that it's not that easy to account for. Mike, thank you for doing this on the four-year anniversary of the start of this phase of the war.

1:01:18Thanks for the most recent fantastic piece and all the work you've done for foreign affairs over the last few years. Thanks a lot. Thanks for hosting us.

1:01:29Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today's show at foreignaffairs.com. This episode of the Foreign Affairs Interview was produced by Ben Metzner, Mary-Kate Godfrey, and Konish Theroux. Our audio engineer is Todd Yeager. Original music is by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to Irina Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in.

1:02:17We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Foreign Affairs interview. Don't forget to visit foreignaffairs.com slash spotlight to sign up for Dan Kurtz-Valen's free weekly newsletter featuring more of the clear-headed analysis that you enjoy here on the podcast. Sign up today at foreignaffairs.com slash spotlight.