What happened to the Ukraine War? Why did the world stop paying attention to it? And why has it been so important for the global order to shift their focus away from what was supposed to be the defining conflict of our time?
00:01:15.160I've heard every once in a while, if you're watching the Olympics and the Ukrainians involved, they'll reference it.
00:01:19.880But otherwise, we basically have heard nothing about this conflict for a very long time.
00:01:25.620And if you're like me, you're probably thinking to yourself, hey, whatever happened to this world war, this war that was going to be the most important thing we could imagine, the battle of our lifetime?
00:02:12.520And why has it been so important for the global order to shift their focus away from what was supposed to be the defining conflict of our time?
00:02:22.740But before we get into all that, guys, let's hear from today's sponsor.
00:02:27.260Universities today aren't just neglecting real education.
00:06:37.180Well, that's definitely a big question to answer.
00:06:40.120In general, the war is in its, I would say, middle phase where Russia is slowly demonstrating its advantages,
00:06:47.680especially in military material, and is beginning to push most parts of the front toward taking control of the entire four oblasts that they've annexed, especially Donetsk and Luhansk.
00:07:01.760So we're seeing now a turnabout where instead of the Ukrainians either holding or in some cases making small advances like they did in last year's spring or summer offensive,
00:07:13.400it's now the Russians who have the momentum and that momentum is accelerating, particularly after the fall of the fortress city of Dievka in March of this year.
00:07:23.000And so it's quite clear at this point that the Ukrainian capability to launch offensives against the Russians is basically exhausted.
00:07:32.560And, you know, as our own General Patton said, no one ever defended anything successfully.
00:07:39.460And if the Ukrainians can't attack anymore, except in very limited capacities, they're not actually going to be able to defeat the Russians and push them out of their country.
00:07:48.220Whereas on the Russian side, the Russians are gaining an increasing amount of territory and inflicting an increasing amount of casualties on the Ukrainians.
00:07:56.620So if you just look at the numbers and you project current trends into the future, the Ukrainian army is probably going to be at the breaking point.
00:08:04.620Let's say another, we're on day 870 or something like that right now.
00:08:09.860Let's say in another 870 days, the Ukrainian army is probably going to be at its breaking point, if not before then, or there could be a peace arrangement.
00:08:18.100It's trending toward at least the minimum Russian victory where they successfully take the Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Lugansk Oblast that they've formally annexed into the Russian Federation.
00:08:29.160So what is the key factor that is allowing the Russians to make this consistent headway?
00:08:40.100I know we've seen a lot about the Ukrainian forces.
00:08:43.400Obviously, the plan of most Western nations was to kill Russians until every Ukrainian man was gone.
00:08:50.560From what I've heard, they're drafting up to very above middle-aged men, very hard to find men anymore to staff the army.
00:09:01.720You also sent me a lot of information about just the munitions deficit, just the fact that they were not able to continue to shell on a regular basis the way they had been able to previously, which was making it difficult for them to be competitive.
00:09:17.740Is it just they're just missing out on both men and munitions at this point?
00:09:22.900It's mostly the much-vaunted 155-millimeter shell, which is sort of the backbone of Ukraine's artillery.
00:09:30.740In any given war, artillery amounts to about 80% of the total casualties.
00:09:35.640So it's really what makes or breaks an army in warfare.
00:09:39.580Now, a few years ago, in 2023, actually, even, the Ukrainians, especially while they were on their counteroffensive, were firing more artillery shells per day on the key combat areas than the Russians.
00:09:53.820But now the Russians have pulled way ahead in that sphere.
00:09:56.840So current metrics, at least from March, place it at about 2,000 shells per day from Ukraine and 10,000 shells per day from Russia being fired.
00:10:07.060And that may sound like a lot, but it's not compared to older wars like World War I, where millions of rounds were expended in a month.
00:10:15.880Now, basically what this amounts to is that Russia is going to be able to kill far more Ukrainians than Ukrainians are able to kill Russians.
00:10:26.240And this is not just a linear problem, but it's more like logarithmic or geometric, because when you're firing more and more shells, that snowballs into other advantages in terms of how you can use your own infantry, right?
00:10:40.040So as Russia continues to pull ahead in artillery production and use, the Ukrainians are going to suffer more and more casualties.
00:10:49.160As that article I sent you references, the quote in it was, let me see if I could pull it up.
00:10:55.500Yes, a source from Ukraine's general staff provided Reuters with the information that when Ukraine was firing, 10,000 shells per day, between 35 and 45 Ukrainian soldiers were killed daily and about 250 to 300 wounded.
00:11:10.420But when the daily fire fell to half that, more than 100 Ukrainian soldiers were killed per day and at least 1,000 were wounded.
00:11:16.680So we can see that, according to this source, when the amount of shells being fired by Ukraine halved, the number of killed and wounded by Ukraine or on Ukraine's side went up far more than double, right?
00:11:31.280So this is a big problem for Ukraine, and it's not really one they can solve because their primary source of shells is from the West, from the United States of America in particular.
00:11:39.920And we basically expected, our elites expected that they would be able to ramp up production of 155 millimeter shells and other munitions in order to defeat the Russians.
00:11:53.700You know, the Russian economy was going to collapse.
00:11:56.460You know, we were just going to spin up all of these factories and outproduce them.
00:12:00.480But actually, that's not what's happened.
00:12:02.560The United States has not even doubled its 155 millimeter production since 2022.
00:12:08.020In 2022, when the war started, we were at 20,000 shells being produced per month.
00:12:12.960And now we're only at about 36,000 or so.
00:12:17.260And remember, I just mentioned that Russia in its key combat areas is firing 10,000 shells per day.
00:12:25.480And the United States is only producing 36,000 per month.
00:12:30.740And this is why Ukraine's shell expenditure of 125 millimeter has decreased all the way down to 2,000 per day.
00:12:38.520And this is just really the key metric is the Russians can use their artillery far more than the Ukrainians can, which just gives them every single advantage in modern warfare.
00:12:49.580You know, it's kind of a boring way to look at it because people like to talk about drones and ISR and hypersonic missiles.
00:12:57.280But what it comes down to is artillery, the same as it's always been, especially over the last hundred years since the major advancements in artillery in World War I.
00:13:06.420So this is always the problem, I guess, of being used as a pawn in a proxy war is that you don't actually own your supply lines.
00:13:17.700You're not responsible for or you don't have control over the actual munitions that are coming into your country.
00:13:25.640And is this really a demonstration yet again of the failure of Western logistics?
00:13:32.820It feels like there was serious errors made, obviously, with the pandemic.
00:13:37.800The fact that we didn't have all kinds of medical supplies.
00:13:41.080We recognized that we didn't have the ability to produce antibiotics or all these other things that were necessary in the middle of a medical emergency.
00:13:48.980And then obviously the trade was heavily disrupted, everything else that came from that.
00:13:53.480And now we recognize that you not only do we not make enough of a lot of this stuff, but we don't even have the ability to really create the capacity in any kind of realistic timeline.
00:14:06.300So America signs itself up basically for this proxy war, and now it doesn't have the ability to actually produce the type of munitions necessary to fight it.
00:14:16.780This isn't really a heartwarming thought when you have a Western alliance that is pretty clearly trying to gun for some kind of conflict with Iran at this point.
00:14:27.440Yeah, it seems to be, although I'm skeptical that any such conflict with Iran will happen.
00:14:33.240But in either case, yeah, you're right.
00:14:36.100I mean, what this is demonstrating is the Americans don't have the capability to spin up their military industrial complex to compensate for expenditure in an actual war.
00:14:49.200The exact amount is unknown, but we have our own stockpile of 155 millimeter.
00:14:53.580So we haven't just dumped all of our munitions into Ukraine and have none left for ourselves.
00:14:57.420But that said, if we were in a direct peer conflict, the same effect would apply.
00:15:02.440Current production projections, and maybe these are also projections in another way, is 60,000 rounds a month by 2025 and 100,000 a month by 2026, which is still not enough to match what Russia is currently expending.
00:15:20.420Now, of course, they're digging into deeper stockpiles.
00:15:22.560It's not like they're manufacturing 10,000 rounds a day or something insane like that.
00:15:27.360But those stockpiles are going to diminish on our side as well if we were engaged in a full-scale war.
00:15:33.100So, you know, that's what, four years?
00:15:36.220So from 2022 to 2026, we can only 5X our 155 millimeter production.
00:15:41.720I mean, this is not a rate of spinning up your industry and your military-industrial complex that's acceptable.
00:15:50.020You know, for all the money we're actually spending on military, it looks like in the key war-winning areas, we're not up to speed, which is, of course, our own industrial capacity.
00:16:01.280You know, we have all of these high-tech planes that cost billions of dollars each, literally, you know, some of them are going to Ukraine now.
00:16:11.100It's important to have the highest technology you have available.
00:16:15.820But this stuff gets expended early on, especially.
00:16:19.440You know, we saw this in Ukraine where Ukraine basically can only use its air force defensively against Russian missile attacks at this point.
00:16:26.700Because when you deploy these assets, they are countered by manpads and other things like that, and they get shot down.
00:16:33.300And then you're back to, you know, you're back to this meat grinder style of warfare where it's infantry supported by artillery and tanks on the ground.
00:16:41.400And it's not some magical world of hypersonic missiles and jets flying around and, you know, Star Wars level stuff.
00:16:48.040It's war as it always has been, and it seems like our industry is not up to speed in terms of being able to fight that war.
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00:17:26.600So is this a, this feels like a consistent failure, again, of many Western militaries, particularly the United States military.
00:17:36.740You know, whether the troops themselves have the capability, it seems that the tactics are dictated almost by a defense industry-led model of expenditure on, like you said, these extremely, you know, these fancy weapon systems, planes, these kind of things that are exorbitantly priced.
00:17:56.320But we consistently fall down on kind of these nuts and bolts stuff, the meat and potatoes.
00:18:02.460We don't have just the basic supplies, the basic capabilities on the ground or in artillery.
00:18:09.300Everything is concentrated into the newest tech.
00:18:12.840It's making sure that we have the fanciest weapon system available out there or the right aircraft, when often it's just the necessity of being able to lob artillery or kick in a door that we lack.
00:18:23.820Yeah. And you, you see this touted about on Twitter and stuff too, videos about how ineffective our military is now.
00:18:33.360And, you know, one might think that that is exaggerated the extent to which, you know, you just have too many, you know, women in the military.
00:18:40.560You have entire, I saw a video of an entire platoon of women being trained or quote unquote trained the other day.
00:18:48.540And, you know, that's, that's good for a laugh, but it's also serious, right?
00:18:51.800I mean, if you talk, I know a good number of people who have served in the military and so do you, I know.
00:18:58.100And what these guys will tell you is, is basically our special forces are effectively now our regular forces and the regular forces are there just kind of collecting a paycheck.
00:19:08.080And when it comes down to it, we might have, you know, 30,000 at most effective combat troops.
00:19:15.240Okay. So Ukraine and Russia each have more than 10 times that currently deployed in this war.
00:19:21.180So we don't have the personnel to fight a war like Ukraine is doing right now.
00:19:25.420Even if we wanted to get involved in that conflict, people talk about, you know, oh, are the Americans going to send troops over there?
00:19:31.740That's never going to happen because we don't have the troops available.
00:19:34.200And it takes like six months to deploy an armored division overseas.
00:21:22.180The last time we really fought, even, even in Desert Storm, right?
00:21:25.160That war was just a snap of the fingers effectively.
00:21:27.520So it's been decades at this point and all of the institutional memory on how to actually fight a war.
00:21:32.920Those guys are now retiring or they just have, you know, desk jobs in the Pentagon or something.
00:21:38.400Whereas now Russia has probably the most effective military in the world in terms of actually fighting a peer conflict on the ground.
00:21:47.060And that's a really bad position for the United States to be in.
00:21:50.360And it's a position the elites have rather stupidly put us in.
00:21:54.000Yeah, I want to talk a lot more about that because I think the effect that this war has had on kind of the Russian standing in the world, the American standing in the world and the message it sends to people about kind of the ability to flex on the United States is all incredibly important.
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00:23:37.280So like you were saying previously, Charlemagne, the fact that Russia has gotten several years now of experience in fighting a modern war as where the United States is now often, like you said, retiring or sometimes pushing out.
00:23:52.120Many of the people who have any experience in a conflict at all, much less a fifth generation war really sets people's minds to the fact that we are in a precarious situation when it comes to any kind of geopolitical conflict.
00:24:06.760There's a real irony in the fact that I think the United States in many ways originally thought that they were going to be funding the destruction of the Russian Federation.
00:24:16.520Right. They thought that they would be sending Ukrainians in there, destroying them slowly through this war of attrition, draining the Russian military capability and ultimately winning a victory by neutering what Russia can do.
00:24:31.020And instead, basically, America has in many ways spent hundreds of billions of dollars creating a training scenario in which Russia could level itself up to the point where it may be the most combat effective large scale force that's currently existing in the world order.
00:24:49.340Yeah, that's, you know, it's difficult to say exactly what the goals of this war were, because the regime is so opaque and schizophrenic.
00:25:01.840You know, I kind of, I view this like any war, you have your minimal and you have your maximalist aims.
00:25:09.100I mean, it does seem to be based on what our politicians and the, you know, global leaders in these NGOs state is that, you know, basically they want to dismantle the Russian Federation.
00:25:22.460Now, that would, that would be like your maximalist end rate.
00:25:25.040But they also talk about regime change in Russia pretty openly, which is, you know, a step down from actually dismantling Russia itself.
00:25:34.780I think a lower order goal of that was at least the destruction of the Russian armed forces.
00:25:40.420Now, obviously, a lot of material and people have been lost, but we can see that the Russians have not, after two years of conflict, more than two years of conflict now, they have not lost their fighting capabilities.
00:25:53.680At the very least, the United States has achieved sort of a baseline goal of separating Europe and Russia.
00:26:01.740Europe has been convinced, basically, to put all of its old Soviet stocks into the war in Ukraine, which they're going to have to replace with the NATO standards.
00:26:12.220So, effectively, Europe has no real way of going back to a different standard.
00:26:19.140They're now stuck on the Western standards that are led by the United States.
00:26:23.040And, obviously, Europe has been significantly detached from Russia in terms of its trade and its energy relationships.
00:26:31.020You know, of course, we have the Nord Stream pipeline.
00:26:33.840Germany was definitely getting too close to Russia for the United States' liking.
00:26:37.840So, in terms of, like, what the Western elites wanted to achieve and what they did achieve, they, at the very least, detached Europe from Russia and really bumped Europe one step down on the great power potential ladder.
00:26:51.000Because they simply cannot act independently of the United States because the European peninsula simply does not have access to the resources it needs to develop itself as a great power.
00:27:05.780It has to trade with the outside world.
00:27:08.200And the United States has cut that off.
00:27:10.280So, this war has at least achieved that.
00:27:12.880Going a little back to what we were talking about before, you know, when this war started, the United States shipped over these HIMARS missiles, if you remember, you know, this being talked about.
00:27:32.300And what they were able to do is hit Russian buildups of, you know, munitions far behind the lines, pretty much the entire area of Ukraine.
00:27:41.560Because the range in these things were enough that the HIMARS missiles could hit literally anything in the Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine.
00:27:50.640But, at this point, 50% to 70% of HIMARS missiles are jammed and fail to hit their targets.
00:27:57.720So, the Russians have learned how to counter our high-tech weapons.
00:28:02.580We have taught them how to use electronic warfare against us.
00:28:06.980Now, of course, we can take what we've learned there and try to develop countermeasures to that.
00:28:12.360But the fact is, we've now given the Russians the ability to jam a lot of our high-tech missiles.
00:28:19.260I mean, this is a less high-tech example.
00:28:21.740But you also have the Excalibur, which is this modified 155-millimeter shell that's guided.
00:28:27.620And when it was first deployed, its hit rate was 70%.
00:28:31.460And now it's all the way down to 6% from electronic warfare.
00:28:34.920So, the Russians are now countering all these high-tech munitions that we were using against them to allow Ukraine to prevent the Russians from launching any major attacks.
00:28:47.940Now, the Russian electronic warfare is to the point where they can safely build up resources for offensives because those resources are not simply going to be noticed by, you know, American ISR and then hit by a missile that's, you know, going to hit with a, you know, if you have a 50% hit rate, you fire two missiles, right?
00:29:08.000And then you're going to hit the thing.
00:29:10.740So, has this shift really redefined the speed of this war?
00:29:17.580Because I think, obviously, we always get the promise from politicians that wars will be quick and that, you know, we'll have this thing wrapped up in six months is the classic cell line of every war that ends up becoming a massive slog.
00:29:33.700But I think a lot of people looked at the technology.
00:29:36.620They looked at what they thought was a mismatch in certain areas.
00:29:39.700And they expected that one way or another, whether it was the Ukrainians getting enough technology from the West or whether it was the Russians overwhelming the Ukrainians with manpower and munitions, that ultimately, whenever the dam broke, this thing would be over quickly one way or the other.
00:29:59.260And instead, like you said, we've seen several years of constant shelling and people being kind of locked in place in many scenarios.
00:30:10.700Are we seeing the creation of a new trench warfare due to the capabilities of or the ability to dismantle many of the capabilities here?
00:30:21.720I know there's a lot of guesswork here, so no one's going to bring this footage up and hold you to it.
00:30:27.360But is there a projection for how long you think it would be to simply secure, like you said, for Russia, the territory that it wants to annex?
00:30:36.440Well, the front line has not moved very much over the last year, especially close to two years at this point.
00:30:47.140And well, this idea of trench warfare tends to be overused because when I hear trench warfare, I think of World War I and you have these trench systems that are literally across the entire country of France.
00:31:02.520The type of trenches or entrenchments that are built are built on strategically defensible positions, and they're not this giant connected network.
00:31:15.180You know, it's smaller trenches, smaller dugouts that you build in order to protect yourself from, you know, like airburst shells and stuff.
00:31:23.080And yes, there are trenches, but it's not like World War I where you just have this giant line of people in a trench the entire frontage, which is, you know, 500 kilometers or something like that.
00:31:32.520And because then they would all just get killed by artillery, right?
00:31:39.520They're spread out over tens of square kilometers.
00:31:43.040You know, if you have a brigade stationed in some part of the front, their entrenchments are going to be spread over many square kilometers.
00:31:52.240And, you know, especially in this war, it seems like tree lines help, especially because they provide cover from drones.
00:31:59.600That's the key, right, is neither side has enough artillery to simply incessantly bomb like every square inch of the frontage, right?
00:32:08.960So you still have to find where your opponent is and then hit that target with something.
00:32:15.500You still have to make precision strikes in this war.
00:32:18.120It's not like World War I where you're just sort of indiscriminately bombing one area with thousands of shells for, you know, hours or something like that.
00:32:25.980So we're not in a trench warfare like World War I.
00:32:30.480You know, in any war, you're going to have entrenchments.
00:32:33.520So I think that analogy is very much overused.
00:32:36.740What we are seeing, though, is just it's infantry on infantry combat, armored combat, artillery shells, artillery duels.
00:32:43.820You know, one side has an artillery piece.
00:32:46.260Your artillery tries to locate and destroy that piece of artillery.
00:32:52.300It's it's exactly it's you can think about it like if you've seen, you know, a World War II film, it's probably a lot more analogous to that than what you would see in World War I, what you would imagine in World War I.
00:33:03.320Right. And it's not this it's it's more high tech because you do have these, you know, handheld drones that are providing intelligence for you on an individual level.
00:33:15.940Right. Like there are these drone operator.
00:33:18.140I forget the name of the unit, but Russian has Russia has a unit that effectively is teams of drone operators that go out and scout and try and locate something for the Russian artillery to sight in on and destroy.
00:33:33.060Right. So this this is this is a new aspect because you didn't you didn't you wouldn't have that in previous wars that happened.
00:33:40.380And that's really the key difference is drones. And it's it's less these videos of, you know, drones with a small munition attached to it that flies up and blows you up.
00:33:50.500Right. That happens. The main impact, though, of drones is being able to see the battlefield.
00:33:55.600You can literally just see for kilometers, which means nothing can be built up and mass.
00:34:02.580And this is one of the main problems the Ukrainians had in their counteroffensive last year is how do you put together an offensive that's going to require hundreds of vehicles and thousands of men and concentrate it in an area that's like 10 kilometers wide and not be completely obliterated?
00:34:21.800Well, they did get obliterated. Right. Because it's extremely difficult to do that when both sides can just see everything that the other is doing.
00:34:29.880So the combat is doesn't happen with massed units. It happens with with small platoons moving about taking one trench at a time.
00:34:38.660This is a very this isn't a sort of big offensive, big arrow warfare where you have like armored columns driving for tens of kilometers.
00:34:46.440You'll have four or five vehicles drive into a neighborhood, drop off a few dozen troops, drive out quickly before they get hit by something.
00:34:56.120You'll have trench raids where, you know, a platoon goes into, you know, a neighboring trench that might just be, you know, 50 meters away.
00:35:05.840Try to take that that sort of thing. You're not seeing these massive movements of armies because it's impossible in the current paradigm.
00:35:13.260So that almost perfect knowledge that that elimination of fog of war has really reduced the effective unit size because you can't you can't mass anything of any real import in any given time, because if you do, you'll end up losing it pretty quickly because the target is simply too large.
00:35:32.840And it's obvious to the actors. Do you think obviously we can't read the minds of kind of the current Russian intention, but do you think that it will be enough for Putin to to control the regions that he has formerly annexed?
00:35:51.140I mean, obviously, the kind of propaganda was always, well, you know, Putin's just going to conquer the entirety of Europe.
00:35:59.220He's going to sweep the entire map. That was never going to happen.
00:36:02.840That was always a joke. But there was some indication at different points that he might seek far more Ukrainian territory if it became possible, if it became something available to him.
00:36:13.240Do you think the weakening the obvious inability of the United States or other states to go ahead and project power emboldens him to make decisions to capture more territory?
00:36:23.780Well, it's impossible to say anything definitive on that, obviously.
00:36:28.360But, you know, I think my my read of of him is that he remains fairly conservative in his territorial ambitions for Russia, as he always has been.
00:36:39.240I would be surprised if, you know, peace negotiations do take place within the next six months or so that the Russians would seek anything other than the four oblasts they've officially annexed into the Russian Federation.
00:36:53.360At minimum, they, you know, they're not going to de-annex those territories, right? According to Russian law, these are parts of Russia now.
00:37:01.040So at minimum, that's going to be the war aim, which is actually fairly minimal. It's 10 to 20 percent of Ukraine's geographic territory, something like that.
00:37:11.000So it's a fairly small part of the of the country, mostly the Russian speaking parts of the country.
00:37:15.740It's certainly possible that the Russians will wish to annex the Kharkov oblast, and it's certainly possible that they will seek the city of Odessa as well, which would, of course, landlock Ukraine.
00:37:29.700I think it I think his ambitions and the Russian ambitions will really depend on, you know, how how quickly the Ukrainian lines continue to collapse.
00:37:40.240If the rate we're currently seeing accelerates over the next six months, especially the Russians will actually get pretty close to annexing the territories they've claimed in the Donbass, at least Donetsk and Lugansk.
00:37:53.020Right. And if they're able to do that, it's possible that, you know, excursions into Kharkov oblasts might result in that being annexed as well.
00:38:03.580One one thing I see happening potentially is a peace negotiation might look like this.
00:38:09.840The Russians will say, OK, well, we've officially annexed these these four oblasts, Kherson, Zaporozhia, Donetsk and Lugansk.
00:38:18.100You have to give us those because we've taken them. Right. Even if we don't control all the territory, this is our minimum.
00:38:26.100Also, the other oblasts in Ukraine have to have a vote on which country they want to go in. Right.
00:38:32.340And so Russia could annex Odessa without firing a shot simply by including in part of the peace negotiations that, you know, this oblast is each oblast is going to vote on whether or not they want to join the Russian Federation.
00:38:45.220Just like before, there's a good chance that these Russian speaking oblasts like Odessa and Kharkov would actually vote to join the Russian Federation, especially considering the state of Ukraine.
00:38:58.000I mean, even regardless of how you feel about Russia or Ukraine, it's like after what's happened to the country of Ukraine, I mean, which which country would you want to want to be a part of if you're like on the border of Russia and Ukraine and you're given the choice seems pretty obvious.
00:39:14.440So I think people a lot of people seem to believe that the Russians are going to have to actually militarily take all the territory that they may end up possessing.
00:39:24.840That's not the case. Right. This is a war of attrition, not a war of terrain.
00:39:29.060And the goal is to defeat the Ukrainian army and destroy its ability to fight, basically.
00:39:36.340And we've we've seen at this point that the Ukrainian army is no longer capable of launching offensives.
00:39:42.340They're getting close to the point where they're no longer capable of defending for any significant amount of time in an area that that has not been long fortified.
00:39:52.360The city of Avdivka, which was taken in March, that city was in Ukrainian hands for 10 years on the front line.
00:40:00.160Right. That is a 10 year stronghold that is built up with concrete.
00:40:04.140The entire city is a fortress, whereas after Avdivka was taken, the ones have now advanced past that dozens of kilometers because the Ukrainians don't have the advantage of fortifications.
00:40:15.200They've designed for 10 years to stop an enemy army from from taking the territory.
00:40:22.420I mean, for example, the way the Russians took Avdivka ultimately, at least one of the major breakthroughs was they tunneled something like a kilometer through an old sewer line and sent several platoons of men.
00:40:39.260And I think it was around 100 men or something like that behind Ukrainian lines.
00:40:43.620And this sort of opened up a vector of attack on the surface.
00:40:47.060Right. So that was the kind of stuff that the Ukraine that the Russians had to do to break through the fortress city of Avdivka, despite their many advantages.
00:40:56.040You know, that's like something you'd see in a movie. Right.
00:40:59.780Now they are just moving across open terrain because the only fortifications the Ukrainians have are these earthworks.
00:41:09.060Right. They don't they have some older fortifications left, but mostly it's earthworks now.
00:41:14.160And these earthworks have been built up over two years for the most part, at most, and not 10 years.
00:41:20.140So anyway, to get to get back to the question, we're seeing now the Ukrainian army losing the ability to actually hold on to any particular given territory that the Russians persistently attack for very long.
00:41:35.640And eventually what this is going to result in is the entire line is going to start moving at an increasing rate.
00:41:43.200And that's going to start as you see that rate increase, that's going to signal the actual collapse of the Ukrainian armed forces.
00:41:51.240And they're not going to fight all the way back to the Dnieper River. Right.
00:41:54.400It's not going to be the Russians fighting all the way to Kiev for 100 kilometers.
00:41:59.220Eventually, the Ukrainians are going to have to throw in the towel because wars don't end with one side 100 percent wiping out the enemy army.
00:42:07.860Right. That never happens. At some point, the enemy army has to decide, OK, we we can't win this war.
00:42:13.720We were now going to come to terms. And you kind of want to do that when your army is still intact. Right.
00:42:19.920So it would not surprise me if the Ukrainians sought negotiations while their army was still somewhat intact,
00:42:27.040because that allows you to negotiate better terms.
00:42:29.840Whereas if you're obviously an entirely defeated and it's just a matter of time, well, why why would the enemy why would Russia not at that point see maximalist ends?
00:42:40.840You know, it would be like if we look at, you know, World War Two, for example, and you look at 1944 or 45, it's like,
00:42:48.620why would the Russians come to terms with the Germans at that point, given that they're obviously going to completely overrun things?
00:42:54.360Whereas, you know, if you look at something like 1943, where, you know, the Reich was at its greatest expanse at that point,
00:43:02.140they're in a much better negotiating position. Right. The Germans would have been, even though they had effectively lost the war at this point.
00:43:08.880And that's kind of the position that Ukraine is in, is they've they've effectively lost the war,
00:43:12.900but they can still fight and make the Russians pay a heavy price. And that's a card they have on the table.
00:43:18.040You know, although the Russians, although the Ukrainians will inevitably lose the war,
00:43:23.700if current trends continue as they are, and we have every reason to think they will,
00:43:27.900they still have that card on the table to say, OK, look, you could beat us in another two years,
00:43:33.100but you could save 100,000 lives if you, you know, don't take any more than you have now.
00:43:39.600Something like that. Right. So the war is going to come to some sort of negotiated settlement at that point.
00:43:44.620It's not going to be a total wipeout of of the country, Ukraine or something absurd like that.
00:43:50.160And that's that's why the front line has not moved, because the war is not about taking all the territory,
00:43:57.120you know, one step at a time. It's about defeating the enemy army.
00:44:01.460And part of that is taking terrain because you have to fight the enemy where they are
00:44:06.580and make the battlefield more tactically disadvantageous to them. Right.
00:44:11.800So taking Avdivka is tactically disadvantageous to the Ukrainians because now they can't fight
00:44:17.460in highly fortified areas. Now they have to fight in areas where they're going to suffer more attrition.
00:44:23.280Right. That's the point of taking the territory. It's not the territory as such.
00:44:27.100It's to make it easier to inflict more casualties on the opponent.
00:44:31.120I guess the question becomes how much of that decision is really in the hands of the Ukrainian?
00:44:39.300As we've said, so much of their military capacity comes from the West, depending on who's telling the story.
00:44:46.400Zelensky is almost entirely an artificial plant created by the CIA.
00:44:50.900I mean, how much organic power does he really have? How much decision power actually rests in the hands of Ukraine officials?
00:44:59.500And how much of this is really all ultimately a decision that's made by NATO or the United States or some other kind of foreign seat of power?
00:45:09.100Well, we don't even really have to speculate on this much because given that Ukraine would lose the war in probably a month or less
00:45:17.480if supply from the U.S. stopped and other Western countries, the United States can effectively dictate whatever it wants.
00:45:25.600And I mean, there are times, too, when the Russian Ministry of Defense calls up our Pentagon
00:45:30.740and tells the Americans to get the Ukrainians to stop doing this thing, which might it's usually like attacking Russian territory.
00:45:40.080You know, the Russians will literally call our Pentagon, tell them, hey, you need to tell your guys to stop firing into Russian territory or bad things will happen.
00:45:50.260And then that happens. Right. And then a few months later, the Ukrainians will will do it again.
00:45:54.540I mean, this is the kind of thing that's actually happening here.
00:45:56.980So the Americans are in charge here. Right.
00:45:59.220Like Zelensky is on paper in charge. But the thing is, the Americans are the ones providing everything he needs to continue the war.
00:46:07.920If they stop, it's over. So who's in control here?
00:46:11.840Obviously, Zelensky is not running things.
00:46:14.540Now, the flip side of that, the ultimate control over the situation lies with the Ukrainian armed forces or the armed forces of Ukraine, as they're officially called.
00:46:23.440Because, you know, we don't know, at least I don't know much about their internal politics within the army itself.
00:46:31.940But one would imagine that at some point the army is going to have enough of this.
00:46:37.060The population is going to have enough of this.
00:46:39.640Like, you know, the writing is on the wall.
00:46:42.280We're not going to keep fighting and dying in this pointless war.
00:46:44.960So I think Zelensky's time is numbered, you know, either way.
00:46:50.440So we could see the Americans decide, OK, this is enough.
00:46:53.900Or we can see the Ukrainian armed forces decide that, OK, this is enough.
00:46:58.320We're not we're not fighting this this war anymore.
00:47:00.780We need to come to terms because, you know, this isn't like an existential war where, you know, Ukraine can't surrender to Russia because Russia is then going to, you know, wipe out the entire country or something like Ukrainians will understand that, you know, OK, we can come to terms and we can survive and, you know, maybe be a rump state that joins NATO or something.
00:47:24.780Like some other wars have been and how the Americans treat wars, right?
00:47:28.300Russia is a power that can actually be negotiated with by the Ukrainians.
00:47:35.360So is the lesson here, I mean, you know, obviously just speculating, but this is the lesson I would learn if I if I was a foreign power is really that the, you know, the NATO or the Western alliance is is simply a force that has to be survived for sure.
00:47:51.940And so I think it's a sort of amount of time because the majority of its power comes from very expensive technology and the ability to basically concentrate media attention.
00:48:02.660You have, you know, once you lose that media attention, once you lose that momentum that comes from that initial burst of propaganda, all of the financial and and other essential assets that kind of are attached to that, the the the the more willingness to invest in the war and, you know,
00:48:24.660the upfront technology that is slowly kind of countermanded by the Russian forces, really, you end up with just a trickle of in a war of attrition.
00:48:35.900And then the entire war kind of falls in the favor of something like like like the Russian Federation.
00:48:42.740So you have this scenario where, yeah, there's this massive upfront blitz from the West, from NATO, from anyone aligned with the United States.
00:48:51.280But after, you know, six months to a year, the American public, the American media lose interest, the funding dries up, the munitions dry up and the kind of forward thinking technology, the very expensive technology that's being deployed in the field gets countermanded in some way.
00:49:10.760And then you end up in a scenario where you can you can really mop up what's left of the forces that the the West has encouraged to overextend themselves.
00:49:21.620Yeah, I mean, the United States has no credible means other than the nuclear arsenal with with which to threaten Russia.
00:49:28.840I mean, we can't threaten Russia in a conventional war.
00:49:33.120I mean, the logistics of of sending American troops to a European front alone are insane, let alone the actual events on the ground that we've seen over the last two years.
00:49:47.160Anyone who looks at this is going to realize that, yeah, this is this is not possible.
00:49:51.640Right. Even if something crazy like Poland was the jumping off point ready to attack attack Moscow.
00:49:58.900Poland has a massive military at this point.
00:50:22.000Right. One of the reasons I haven't touched on that Russia is doing well, too, is they're they're launching cruise missiles attack.
00:50:28.100Like attacks every few weeks or months against Ukraine, usually in these massive bombardments of dozens, I think even up to 100 missiles sometimes.
00:50:36.460And they hit targets across the entire country, you know, even close to the Polish border.
00:50:42.100And Russia is is manufacturing about 130 to 100 cruise missiles a month.
00:50:48.140Right. Which is basically close to their burn rate.
00:50:51.380So Russia has the capacity to continue to develop high tech solutions as well in order to strike deep into Ukraine.
00:51:01.020It's just relying on that completely is not an option.
00:51:05.200Right. And we've seen that the the Western powers, especially the United States, relies far too heavily on its high tech gadgets and sort of gigantism.
00:51:13.580Right. Like with our aircraft carriers, you know, we saw this happen in the First World War where gigantism took hold in how fleets were built as well.
00:51:23.180But this war is demonstrating that that sort of thinking is not applicable in a long war.
00:51:29.460You're not going to win by having, you know, some sort of uber weapon like your V2 rockets or whatever.
00:51:35.360Right. These things can have some effect, but it's not how the war is won.
00:51:38.900And Russia has shown the West that it can fight a conventional war.
00:51:45.460And the West has demonstrated that it doesn't it doesn't have the capacity to supply logistically a conventional war without breaking itself.
00:51:58.220I think a lot of people, like you said, have difficulty finding any reliable information on this.
00:52:04.300I'm I'm even seeing in chat people saying, no, Ukraine just launched a massive massive offensive and they land and they're they're they're threatening the Russian homeland at this point.
00:52:16.660You know, so so what is the validity of that and where do you go to find what you feel is reliable information on what's actually happening right now?
00:52:27.160Yeah, I figured someone would bring that up.
00:52:29.220I mean, yeah, the Ukrainians just use their special forces to launch an attack toward Kursk.
00:52:34.780Kursk is 100 kilometers away from Ukraine.
00:52:37.660They've launched they've attacked seven kilometers in.
00:52:40.340This is not even as far as they've gone before.
00:52:47.580It's going to be overturned in a week or two, as it always is.
00:52:51.100So, you know, that's the answer to that in terms of, you know, where to get information from.
00:52:55.460You know, for most people, if you're not if you're not interested in, you know, military history and this sort of thing in general, I think one of the best sources is actually from Austria by a colonel named Marcus Reisner.
00:54:05.120And I think that's really all the average person needs is, you know, every few months get some info from a well-balanced source.
00:54:12.300Any Western source, like, or American source, like the Institute of the Study of War, Institute for the Study of War or something, this is just nonsense.
00:54:21.220Other source I really like, and this is more for people who want to deep dive, is I really like this YouTube channel titled The Operational Art of War.
00:54:30.860Run by a Canadian guy known as Jimmy Thomas.
00:54:36.120He's a staff college graduate from Canada, and this is his area of expertise.
00:54:44.100So, to the extent I really know anything about the details of how modern war is fought, it's mostly due to his work.
00:54:52.560And he's sort of doing a history of the war while it's still going on using Google Earth.
00:55:01.080And he is looking at images of the battle around Kiev and, you know, providing his own takes on what he believed happened in that battle.
00:55:14.140So, that's Operational Art of War on YouTube if you want to really understand the details of how modern wars are thought about from an operational perspective, from an actual staff officer's perspective.
00:55:28.040And it also gets into the history of war.
00:55:30.340Excellent. I know that you're doing a lot more writing than you are YouTube at this point.
00:55:38.000So, before we go to the questions of the people, can I let people know where to find your work?
00:55:43.560Yes. I have a blog, charlemagne.substack.com.
00:55:48.740I just published a really long paid piece on the Suez Canal crisis, which I think is something understudied, a pivotal turning point in the 20th century between America, Europe, and Great Britain.
00:56:14.480You can also find our website, theoldgloryclub.com.
00:56:18.520If you go to our events tab, we have a display of eight or so videos describing the conference we had a few months ago that you had attended, of course.
00:56:30.560So, if you're interested in sort of hearing about that, you can check that out as well.
00:56:41.960Yeah, it's interesting to think about that, but, you know, I think Carpathia to Hungary or, you know, I'm sure there are some polls who would love to have Lvov back.
00:57:07.580But I think this gets into sort of Hearts of Iron 4 map game stuff.
00:57:42.040The American state is kind of a unique concept.
00:57:44.760But, yeah, it's basically analogous to a state, sans the fact that American states have a, you know, well, we're supposed to have a high degree of sovereignty in American states.
00:58:09.020They're definitely a bit Russia biased and definitely hype up the capability of Russian victory much more.
00:58:18.880I mean, the way I look at this war, again, is, you know, I've studied World War II a lot.
00:58:24.240And I think most people who study that war sort of realize that the war was lost for the Germans in 1941 when they failed to take Moscow, right?
00:58:33.600But the war continued all the way till 45.
00:58:36.960And the greatest extent of German conquest was in 43, right?
00:58:41.780Which is interesting because their territory expanded to the greatest extent halfway through the war.
00:58:46.900But if you look back on it, you sort of realize that materially it had already been lost, right?
00:58:52.280So people tend to freak out when you're like, oh, the Russians are.
00:58:56.380You keep saying the Russians are winning.
00:59:46.400Yeah, I mean, when the war began in 2014, it was the Ukrainian military was very, very small.
00:59:52.180And irregular forces in Donetsk and Lugansk sort of, well, they held up the Ukrainian military for many months before the front lines solidified to where they are.
01:00:03.780I mean, obviously, the American weapon systems are superior to what Ukraine would be able to provide itself.
01:00:15.940But, you know, this is just the classic problem that America has run into in many different scenarios, and particularly here.
01:00:24.060It's not that the weapon systems aren't impressive, at least in some way, but that in a protracted battle, you know, the just attrition involved means that these, you know, high tech, high maintenance, very expensive systems tend to slowly lose their advantage to more conventional forces.
01:00:45.620He's saying that Russian irregulars were able to take over a large amount of the Donbass in 2014.
01:00:54.260And the fact that against the full might of the Russian army now, the Ukrainians are able to hold up the Russians is demonstrating that our weapons are adequate.
01:01:05.460So, yeah, I agree with your response there.
01:01:09.200I mean, if you're interested, too, in this this subject of what the Ukrainian military has had over the last several years, there's a series of yearly publications that come out.
01:01:24.540I will I'll search for it on my computer and then and then remind you that at the end of the stream.
01:02:02.280And of course, if it's your first time here, make sure you subscribe to this YouTube channel.
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