This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #504 with Preston Stewart & Michael Kofman.
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Table of Contents
Here are the loose “chapters” in the conversation.
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- 0:00 – Introduction
- 1:00 – State of the war in Ukraine
- 14:39 – Drone warfare and the kill zone
- 51:49 – Who is winning the war?
- 1:03:26 – Military analysis of Russia’s 2022 invasion
- 1:19:14 – Battle of Bakhmut
- 1:34:56 – War optimism and bad information
- 1:55:05 – Prigozhin’s mutiny
- 2:09:20 – Putin vs Zelenskyy
- 2:27:18 – Trump
- 2:36:13 – Paths to peace in Ukraine
- 2:46:53 – Nature of war
Introduction
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Preston Stewart and Michael Kofman about the war in Ukraine. Preston is a West Point graduate and Afghanistan veteran who covers the war extensively on his YouTube channel called Preston Stewart, his podcast called War and Conflict, and his newsletter called Defense Tech News. Michael is a world-class military analysis expert specializing in the Russian and Ukrainian militaries. He is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, and he hosts the Russia Contingency Podcast on the War on the Rocks platform. Please follow and support their work. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on.
Lex Fridman
And now, dear friends, here’s Preston Stewart and Michael Kofman.
State of the war in Ukraine
Lex Fridman
Gentlemen, thank you for doing this late-night conversation. Let’s see how long we go. The war in Ukraine is in its fifth year. Let’s lay out what is the state of the war in terms of territories, in terms of battles, in terms of everything that you talk about from a military perspective. Mike, do you want to go first?
Michael Kofman
Yeah, sure. I think that the war had probably an inflection point last year, and most people recognize that this year for Ukraine is the best year of combat performance for them on the ground since probably about the summer of twenty twenty-three offensive. But there’s a dichotomy to it because on the one hand, Ukraine’s doing really well along the front line, but it faces the challenge of an expansive Russian strike campaign and the cumulative damage that has been inflicted to Ukrainian infrastructure, both energy and all sorts of civilian types of infrastructure over the course of several years. And so the winter is quite uncertain on what’s going to happen in Ukraine’s population centers.
Michael Kofman
Now, I know Ukraine has proven resilient and is going to get through this winter, but the level of damage to the economy remains unclear. The Russian military is doing quite poorly this year in the war. For them, this is probably their worst year of combat performance since winter of twenty twenty-three. And it’s clear that the way they’ve been fighting has reached diminishing returns, not in twenty twenty-six, but I would probably peg it as far back as summer of twenty twenty-five.
Michael Kofman
They increasingly will face some manpower issues, and their effort now fixates more on strategic bombardment, which, while inflicting a lot of damage on Ukraine, has historically a challenge in that strategic bombardment does not have a great track record or even a good track record of achieving maximalist political aims in the war, especially if a ground campaign is unsuccessful or is floundering as Russia’s is at this stage of the conflict. So the history of strategic bombardment as a way to try to win the war in the absence of the success of other efforts is not a good one. Although as an analyst, I’ll tell you, most political leaders always think that it might work for them, even if you tell them that it doesn’t.
Michael Kofman
And so it’s unsurprising to see that Russia’s now leaning heavily towards strategic bombardment as a key pillar of its strategy.
Lex Fridman
I think it would also be nice to lay out the basics every time you bring them up.
Michael Kofman
Sure.
Lex Fridman
Maybe can you give a quick tangent of the twenty twenty-three offensive and then what strategic bombardment is as opposed to the other mechanisms of war?
Michael Kofman
Sure. So in twenty twenty-three, there were a series of fairly set piece offensives and counter-offensives. After a partial mobilization with manpower replenished and some reserves established, Russia attempted a winter offensive, but its forces were unready. And so the winter campaign for Russia in twenty twenty-three was largely a failure, perhaps with the exception of the grinding battle over the city of Bakhmut. Then Ukraine launched a much-anticipated summer offensive using units that were freshly trained and equipped by Western countries. And there was a great deal of kind of hope and expectations that were placed upon this offensive, but it too failed. It lasted several months. I think in reality, it went from June twenty twenty-three till about November of twenty twenty-three.
Michael Kofman
And then Russia tried to seize the initiative again and started its own offensive in fall twenty twenty-three with the Battle of Avdiivka. But so summer of twenty twenty-three is one of the periods where we still see an exchange in terms of initiative between the two sides and fairly clear-cut major offensive operations and counter-offensive operations. And in twenty twenty-three early on, you have a failed Russian winter offensive. This is probably one of the worst points for the Russian military in the war, fall through winter, fall twenty twenty-two through winter of twenty twenty-three. And then you have the Ukrainian summer twenty twenty-three offensive, where Ukraine does gain some ground, but it’s not what people hoped for.
Michael Kofman
And since then, for much of the war, you know, you see Russia trying to establish and having an advantage in manpower and material. And for much of twenty-four and twenty-five, Russia actually tends to have the initiative, even though it’s largely pursuing a grinding offensive on a very broad front. And if I sort of fast-forward and take us into twenty twenty-six, you really start to see the inflection point probably around fall of twenty twenty-five. And then in twenty twenty-six, the Russian effort is quite floundering, and Russian forces face significant reversals with the battle space a lot more dynamic this year. Ukraine has two of its own localized offensives running.
Michael Kofman
And you see there’s actually much greater fluidity in twenty twenty-six on the battlefield, certainly at the tactical level than you would in twenty-five or twenty-four. There’s often a perception that it’s just a positional stalemate. But in fact, even more recently, some of Ukraine’s offensive operations had gained more terrain than Ukrainian forces were able to do during the summer twenty twenty-three offensive, which was planned to be a much bigger operation.
Lex Fridman
Also, it might be useful to kind of state perhaps the obvious, but the nature of this war. One of the things, especially as it evolved, the role of drones on the front, and maybe this is where you can loop in strategic bombardment as well. Like, what are the main mechanisms of war here?
Michael Kofman
So we look at this war beyond what’s happening at the front line. Russia has, from the very beginning of the war, had a series of strikes, an expansive strike campaign, but it really begins in fall 2022, where they begin launching combination strikes of long-range air-launched cruise missiles and short-range ballistic missiles against Ukrainian critical infrastructure. And by critical infrastructure, I mean power plants, substations, various types of heating plants, things that a country needs in order to sustain the economy and the population. And over time, those targets expand, right? Russia targets various types of civilian infrastructure.
Michael Kofman
And actually, at this point in 2026, we’ve seen that campaign really broaden to include warehouses, data centers, schools, medical facilities, malls, actually quite a few shopping malls in the last few months, trains. So it’s gone far beyond energy infrastructure to include a host of other civilian types of targets. And it changed over time from being primarily done with cruise missiles and ballistic missiles to being mostly conducted via saturation strikes using large numbers of one-way attack drones.
Michael Kofman
And those drones themselves evolved in terms of the systems, gone now from being largely done with cheaper, easier to shoot down propeller-driven drones to ones that are jet-powered and are, in effect, light ground-launched cruise missiles, and a much larger number of ballistic missiles, some which are more sophisticated. And so Ukraine’s been facing both large combination strikes, but also daily sustained pressure, constant attacks with jet-powered drones that generate alerts and that disrupt economic life and try to exhaust Ukraine’s air defense.
Lex Fridman
By the way, I forgot to mention that I’m a big fan of both of yours. It’s an honor to have the both of you here, Mike and Preston. Preston, I’ve been watching you for a long time, so thank you for being here. So yes, to ask you, do you have, to build on what Mike was saying, and maybe can you also speak to some of the geographic areas that are in question here that are most contested?
Preston Stewart
Yeah, absolutely, Lex. Honor to be here. Always a challenge to add anything to what Mike has to say. We’ll give it a shot here. I think it’s good to get an idea of the areas that we’re gonna be talking about. In Ukraine, the fight still is predominantly in the east and the southeast. So Kyiv, kind of in the middle of the country, is not facing direct Russian attacks in terms of infantry and short-range drones. They, of course, are on the receiving end daily of long-range drones and missile strikes. But as you move through the border region, starting in the north, there are Russian infiltrations in Sumy. There’s also fighting in Ukrainian territory in Kharkiv.
Preston Stewart
And then you get down into what’s known as the Donbas, Luhansk, and Donetsk, and this is where some of the heaviest fighting throughout the war has taken place. And this is, I’m sure we’ll get into it later, but an area referred to as the Fortress Belt that Ukraine has turned into just an absolutely brutal area for Russia to try to advance through. It is costing Russia a lot of people day in and day out. Moving from there, we’re into Zaporizhzhia, and then Kherson butts up against the Black Sea.
Lex Fridman
And some of the strategic bombardment that Mike was talking about. So that’s beyond the, even these areas. So even Kyiv is being hit, so a lot of the places throughout Ukraine is being hit.
Preston Stewart
And some in the western portion of the country, not as frequently. Kyiv is a- … a focus.
Michael Kofman
If you look along the front today, you have essentially some Russian border incursions trying to establish a small buffer across the border, which are lower intensity areas of fighting in Sumy, Kharkiv. You have an ongoing fighting around city of Kupyansk and Kharkiv region. And then you have the focus of Russian offensive efforts, Preston was saying, still trying to take the remainder of the Donbas, and that fighting ranges all the way down from cities like areas like Liman, all the way towards the main conglomeration of cities. And we should mention them now because I think they’re gonna come up, that are remaining in the Donetsk region, which are Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, and Kostiantynivka, which troops all colloquially call Kostya, because its name’s too long.
Michael Kofman
And then further west of that is Dnipropetrovsk, which is a main city now that’s been essentially an anchor in Ukrainian defense, west of that conglomeration, with another chain of cities behind it. And if we head southwest, we get into the Dnipro region and then Zaporizhzhia. And Zaporizhzhia is an interesting, fairly dynamic area because you have both Russian and Ukrainian forces on the offensive at the same time, where you have Russian forces trying to push west of Huliaipole, and you have northeast of that, Ukrainian forces having had the initiative for much of the year. A tactical grouping of Ukraine air assault brigades has been running kind of a creeping offensive there, has been pretty successful in making gains.
Michael Kofman
And the other area which we might get into later around Lyman was Ukraine’s Third Corps having conducted a successful offensive operation as well called Vihod. So those are two areas where Ukraine’s not only contesting the initiative, but actually it’s liberating territory, and in many ways wiping out Russian gains from 2025. And that’s what I meant when I was saying earlier that this is a much more dynamic battle space than people think, in that territory is a lot more fluid. There’s a vast gray zone, in fact, between the two lines. Ukraine does not hold cohesive defensive lines.
Michael Kofman
It often has essentially pickets with small number of infantry that mark positions, but much of the territory is essentially contested such that in a battle space defined by dense control via drones and a sort of a sizable engagement zone, which varies from place to place, but you might say roughly it might be 15 kilometers forward and back of the front line. Although in some areas it’s more, in other areas it’s less. It depends. What happens is, in reality, that it becomes more of a gray zone, and as Preston was saying, Russian forces try to get past this drone engagement zone or defeat zone through infiltration.
Michael Kofman
That’s their main challenge, either through individual infantry, through light motorized attacks on motorcycles and ATVs, and they try to essentially get as far back past Ukrainian positions as they can, whereas Ukraine’s largely defending with a combination of prepared defenses, minefields, and a large array of drones and drone units that are effectively engaging Russian forces before they get to their, even their own front line, their forward line of troops. And if they get past that point, they get past Ukrainian initial positions, then Ukrainian drone units essentially pick them up there. So it’s, in many respects, kind of a zonal defense.
Michael Kofman
But we should unpack that a bit because people see this as a drone war, and the statistics out there do show that drones inflict 80% of the losses. However, it is really a combination of things, and the dynamic is one that involves traditional defense and minefields that make it very hard for mechanized assaults or light motorized assaults to break through. Artillery, which still plays a role in the battlefield because it forces the enemy forces to disperse, it has a shaping dynamic. Even if you don’t use it much, the fact that it’s present, it makes it hard for troops to concentrate or suppresses them. It slows them down in the assault, making them easy targets for drones.
Michael Kofman
And it’s still relevant because drones also have their own limitations, and two periods of the war when they often have limitations seasonally are spring and fall, again to the winter, because the weather becomes poor. You get high wind, you get rain. Drones don’t work nearly as effectively during poor weather, and so artillery’s a very important backup. And if you just had drones and you didn’t have anything else, no minefields, no artillery, I don’t think Ukraine would be able to hold the terrain this effectively with the low density of forces, the men that they currently have deployed. So it’s important to describe as a combination of means, even if drones play such a central role, that folks don’t ignore the interaction of these different capabilities in Ukraine’s approach.
Drone warfare and the kill zone
Lex Fridman
So sorry to linger on the basics, but, uh-
Michael Kofman
Sure.
Lex Fridman
… can we, like, lay out, so artillery is big guns. What’s the role of individual infantry? What’s the role of tanks? What is this gray zone? What does it actually look like? How many drones are floating above? What does it look like, as Preston was saying, for an individual infantry soldier to run through that? Can you paint a picture of some of the basic things here?
Preston Stewart
Not good to run through that. It- … it’s terrifying. There’s constant eyes in the sky, but to kind of walk this out a little bit, artillery generally speaking, 105 or 155 millimeter cannons. That’s what we use here in the United States. It’s primarily what Ukraine has been using now as it kind of shifted over to a NATO standard. You’re talking about 20-ish kilometer range, which at a time was big, and there was a phase in this war where that was seemingly to determine the direction that it was gonna go. It was who had more artillery-
Preston Stewart
… who could mass fires in certain directions. It’s just changed so drastically now to where the drone range has pushed those further and further back. So cannons are on the battlefield. There are some that are dug in, kind of in entrenched positions. Others are mobile on tracks or wheels ’cause they gotta get out of there. As soon as they fire, there’s so many drones overhead watching them. When you get into the drones then on the battlefield, there’s a number of them being utilized. Reconnaissance drones is kind of where everything starts, and those are just big fixed wing drones for the most part that they can stay airborne for quite a while.
Preston Stewart
They’re generally low cost, and that’s been a dynamic that we’ve seen with both Russia and Ukraine in this war, is they’ve gone from the very few but high cost, maybe larger drones, down to a ton of low cost, borderline attritable. They don’t wanna lose all these drones, but it’s not that big of a deal to lose one compared to, say, a US Predator Reaper that costs, you know, 20-plus million dollars. So they’ve got these reconnaissance drones up constantly. Both sides have these up. When they spot something, that is passed along to the appropriate drone unit and it is engaged based off of what they have available to them. The, I would say, most common one that we see in terms of the media that has the most attention, would be the FPV drones.
Preston Stewart
Those are small kind of quadcopters. You see them flying 12 inches, 18 inches. I think they might get up to 20 inches at times. Generally, there’s a munition attached to the end of that. They crash it into something and it detonates. They can swap that out for anti-personnel munitions or go after vehicles or fortifications, and they can do that on the spot. So there are mountains of these FPVs. There was a picture of Kim Jong Un, actually, North Korea walking through a hallway of stacked FPVs. So these are the very small, low cost, attritable drones, and they’re being used. The numbers are staggering.
Michael Kofman
I’d say for FPVs, it’s probably somewhere eight to 10,000 per day, just those, not including other types of tactical drones. And that would be for one side of the war. So to give you a sense that these are hundreds of thousands of these being employed per month. These strike capabilities exceed all the numbers of personnel and equipment on the battlefield by a very substantial amount.
Lex Fridman
And just to clarify, behind every FPV drone, there’s a human being operating it. So there’s also, from the news or something, there’s a sense that autonomy is being utilized. It is not. So this is something you guys talked about. There’s usually humans behind the drones.
Michael Kofman
Well, I’ll be frank, most of this war are systems that are remotely operated, but they are operated by people. It is actually quite manpower intensive. And in fact, it’s, in many cases, if you look at both Russian and Ukrainian military, they had to build out substantial numbers of drone units and channel manpower into the drone component of the fight. It’s not even a ratio of one to one, so one person to one drone. A typical drone team might require two or three people. You have a pilot, you have a co-pilot navigator. This is exhausting, tiring work. I’m not saying that other traditional missions are easy, but with a drone you have to be looking at a screen the whole time, all day. You have to be flying it, it’s very intensive. Somebody else has to navigate.
Michael Kofman
Another person might be the technician or the person who arms the system. And so almost all the systems in this war are remotely operated, whether they’re flying drones, one-way attack strike drones, whether they’re UGVs, uncrewed, you know, ground vehicles. And they require considerable support. At the end of the day, these are physical objects that require equipping, they require troubleshooting. And like most things in war, they don’t even necessarily work well or right out of the box as well. It’s what a lot of people don’t necessarily appreciate about military affairs, that a lot of things don’t necessarily work as intended on the battlefield. Somebody’s gotta be there to fix it, they have to be there to check it.
Michael Kofman
So the bottom line is that it is actually quite manpower intensive. There is a degree of semi-autonomy, terminal guidance and targeting at the very last point, or maybe the pilot can hit a box over a vehicle and then the drone knows that that’s what it should go after, these kind of moments. And ways that the drone can overcome enemy electronic warfare or jamming with this kind of terminal guidance. But most of these use cases are a tiny percentage of the overall fight and the overall number of drones being employed in this war. I think in some ways, I hate to take away from the autonomy and artificial intelligence conversation.
Michael Kofman
This war is testing that, and there are plenty of areas where I see it’s being tested, but to some extent it’s been over-hyped in terms of the percentages being, the percentage of the fight that’s actually being run that way. It is very much still a human-centric war with a lot of manpower involved running, operating, and maintaining all of these capabilities.
Lex Fridman
So one of the other novel aspects of this war is so much of it is televised, so that you could see videos from the drone perspective on both sides of that drone killing another human being. And one misconception I heard you talk about is that it takes one drone to accomplish that task, and it actually takes a lot more. Can you speak to that in terms of the number of drones it takes to accomplish a particular task, like to destroy a piece of technology or to I don’t know the right way of speaking about this-
Preston Stewart
That’s it.
Lex Fridman
But to kill another person.
Preston Stewart
Yeah. Eliminate a target might be a cold way of saying that. We’re in an interesting place where there’s a lot of propaganda value in footage for anybody using it in any military right now in a way that we didn’t have access to even just a few years ago. So there’s a lot of interest in being able to show… I mean, we have seen now people will not take reports that something happened unless there’s a video of it. Which is insane because that, you know, a few years ago, you would never have expected to have video of a missile strike in Crimea on a Russian airfield. Now, if there’s no video, it’s maybe it didn’t even happen.
Preston Stewart
So the expectation is there and countries are meeting that by being able to say like, “Look, we penetrated your defenses. Look what we did,” or, “Look at all the soldiers we killed as they were, we were making this approach.” So it’s out there. There’s only a tiny fraction that’s made public in the first place. And of those, that’s only a tiny fraction of what actually accomplishes the mission. So drones, the batteries run out, they get jammed.
Preston Stewart
All of a sudden the screen just goes dark. Sometimes they impact and they don’t detonate. You know, all sorts of little things like that. That footage doesn’t make it out. It in turn kind of creates this perception that one $300 drone or one $500 drone is eliminating a tank, and that’s not happening. Maybe with the right munition and with a lucky shot and the tank isn’t expecting it, maybe it’s possible. Realistically, we’re seeing 10, 20, I think upwards of 30 of these small drones at times being utilized to actually eliminate a tank.
Lex Fridman
So we should be imagining a very large number of FPV drones just hunting humans in tanks and technology.
Michael Kofman
The problem with understanding what the ratios are is the videos have a strong anchoring effect, and the videos are all videos of successes. There are no videos of misses. So unless you’re actually there, you’re able to collect the data, you don’t know what percentage of hits or percentage of drones launched that really is. You might get easily the impression that 100% of the drones launch a hit. As Preston said, that’s very far from the case. So you need quite a few drones. For people, even though on videos it looks like a one-to-one ratio, it’s often not. I think it’s often a lot closer to maybe five drones or something like that.
Lex Fridman
Per person?
Michael Kofman
Yeah, in practice. And I’ve seen, I’ll be frank, I’ve myself seen videos that aren’t public, where in the most extreme case, I saw one on a field trip in July where it took 12. On tanks, the most outside example I heard of a well-armored protected Russian tank with electronic warfare, one of these tanks that looks like a large barn, essentially, it’s so so heavily protected last year was 79. That’s an extreme case, but most, as Preston said, is about 30 to 40. For an infantry fighting vehicle, about 15, maybe 15 to 20, depending, again. And you have some percentage of drones that are jammed, they don’t make it to a target. You have some percentage of drones that may fail to detonate. So it’s quite a few.
Michael Kofman
And- You know, in talking to folks who are trying to return mobility and maneuver to the battlefield that specialize in drone-enabled mechanized assault, where they have both mechanized units and drone units supporting them, a company that, mechanized company that goes on the attack now expects to take about close to 300 hits in that assault. They expect vehicles to take quite a few hits, and most to be able to withstand them. So it does take quite a few drones, but the sheer saturation numbers of drones out there is very difficult to overstate.
Lex Fridman
So given that, what does a battle look like? How do you gain territory given these drone units, this huge amount of drones, this gray zone, also mentioning artillery, like you mentioned, and tanks? How do they work together in order to be able to do something like gain territory?
Preston Stewart
Well, they’re doing it differently now. We’re seeing a very different approach from Ukraine than we are from Russia. I can try to speak to the Russian part if you want to maybe take the Ukrainian offensive here in a second.
Preston Stewart
But Russia has defaulted to more of an infiltration-type tactic, where rather than large formations that get spotted, again, 10, 20, 30 kilometers away from the front, and they’re then hunted down with long range drones. They don’t even have the opportunity to get near the front line, so they stopped doing that. We started to see Russia move towards more motorized assaults with just pickup trucks, ATVs, even a lot of motorcycles at a point. Now it’s mostly just individual infantrymen. They have checkpoints on a map. There’s– they’re released, and they’re sent forward five, 10, 20 kilometers trying to move to a forward location where they can consolidate. And again, the Ukrainian lines, they look clean on a map. They’re not.
Preston Stewart
There’s a lot of gaps in there because a lot of it is being held with overhead drone coverage to just monitor approaches, and the Russians will get through. And one is a bit of a headache. Three becomes a bigger problem, and all of a sudden they’re harassing supply lines, and that forces Ukrainian units to move back a little bit, forces Ukrainian drone pilots to move back a little bit, and that opens up the battlefield for more Russian soldiers to come forward just a little. There’s a reason that the lines are moving so slowly right now. That infiltration is incredibly costly. We talked with an American volunteer, Marine, fighting with the First National Guard Corps as of in the Dobropillia direction a little over a year ago.
Preston Stewart
He described this as an incredible tactic if you don’t care about losing soldiers. He said, “It’s great. You can just kind of chew through terrain. You can get there eventually. You’re just gonna lose 90, 95% of your guys along the way.” That’s generally what we’ve seen from Russia over the course of the last at least six months, maybe a full year. Ukraine has been going about it in a different manner, especially with some of their recent counteroffensive stuff.
Michael Kofman
The way I look at it is first that in 2025, this war really began to be much more of a tug of war over who has superiority in this drone engagement zone, which forces locally call the kill zone. And the side that is able to suppress the other side’s drone units through drone strikes, traditional artillery strikes, for Russia also heavy use of glide bombs, standoff glide bombs launched by Russian fixed wing aircraft, that side is then able to push the drone support further away from the front line, and then by displacing it, then be able to actually advance in that way. And so a lot of it’s been a tug of war actually over who has superiority in drones and fire support.
Michael Kofman
And increasingly on the Ukrainian side, where we see successful offensive operations, it’s because you have a very well thought through plan to set the conditions for the operation, begin to suppress Russian drone units, begin to interdict logistics behind the drone units so that they don’t get sufficient supplies, begin to figure out how to potentially channel them by essentially pushing them into certain zones of operations where you can then localize, figure out where they’re going to be when you’re going to do the assault, then having a coordinated strike plan for how you’re going to suppress them during the assault, and then now you’ve actually established the conditions for your forces to advance with some mobility and to dramatically reduce your losses.
Michael Kofman
Because Ukraine cannot afford to fight the way Russia does. It doesn’t have the manpower, and it doesn’t… Even if it did have the manpower, it’s not a question of numbers, it’s a question of culture. Ukraine would not treat its forces in the same way. It wouldn’t accept those kind of losses of its own troops. And so you’ve seen a couple different approaches on the Ukrainian side probably over the past year, and different assault units experimenting with them.
Michael Kofman
You know, you have I think some advanced drone assault units like CODE 9.2 and First Separate Assault Regiment that often work together, who are essentially using a combination of drones and very well-equipped and adapted mechanized formations to try to return maneuver to the battlefield and try to take terrain in a more mobile way, do it faster, rather than having a kind of slow-moving, grinding, creeping offensive. And you’ve seen all the way down to maybe the opposite side of the spectrum, air assault brigades very effectively employing three-man fire teams with drone support, systematically clearing tree line by tree line by tree line, slow and steady, but keeping their casualties low. This would be in the South and Zaporizhzhia.
Michael Kofman
And on a broad front, still over time, over the course of this year, taking back a significant amount of terrain. And a bunch of other methods in between. So I won’t say that there’s been one method, but different units experimenting with different ways of doing it. And on the Russian side, as Preston said, it’s a combination of mechanized light motorized assault sometimes, but increasingly Russians are using mechanized assault simply to consume the attention of Ukrainian drone units, to distract them or try to basically get them to focus on the mechanized assault so that light motorized assaults can get through, can get past their initial positions, all these soldiers on motorcycles and ATVs, and even believe it or not, I’ve seen Ladas and things of that nature.
Lex Fridman
For the infiltration side, like literally soldiers on motorcycles- … trying to gain position- … so they can then attack the supply chains to force Ukrainian forces to push back.
Michael Kofman
Let me maybe even take one minute just to explain why that’s, that can be a challenge for Ukraine, ’cause it may sound to someone listening to this a bit preposterous, right? So let me offer why that can pose a challenge, and sometimes light motorized attacks have proven more successful than traditional mechanized attacks. Because mechanized attacks are a small number of vehicles. Typically, the leading vehicle has a big trawl to clear mines. You know, Ukrainian drones can easily gang up on it and then start isolating the column. And light motorized attacks is a whole number of soldiers. It could be 100 motorcycles, it could be more than 100 motorcycles, who are trying to use speed to overcome this sort of engagement zone.
Michael Kofman
The reason why that can be an issue sometimes, even though most of them get taken out, I want to be clear, most of them are not successful. But Ukrainian forward positions are often three-man posts. They’re not even really firing position observation posts. They’re essentially pickets with considerable separation between them of several hundred meters, right? So Ukraine might have three of these for a kilometer. That means there’s considerable space between them, so you could drive through. Then behind them, there might be secondary positions, but they’re still pretty sparse in between. Most of the units involved in the fight are essentially supporting units, different type of fire support, drone support, traditional artillery fires, logistics, what have you.
Michael Kofman
Many Ukrainian units don’t really have the manpower to merely launch a counterattack if Russian forces break through. Some do, some have a quick reaction force ready, but for some, the manpower isn’t necessarily there. So it can be a challenge if units do get through and they begin to accumulate. And what can happen, and this is how infiltration works for Russia, even though it’s incredibly costly. You can imagine 10 soldiers going forward, and seven of them don’t make it, but three do, and they found the path in between positions. So now the people that sent them know that this is the gap in Ukrainian positions, and they can then daisy-chain send the next group down this path. Now, somewhere behind Ukrainian lines are now three Russian troops, but maybe it’s five, six, seven.
Michael Kofman
Now they’re accumulating. Well, behind those positions, if you get three to five kilometers back, now you’re reaching the first drone reconnaissance units that are flying Mavics. They are not prepared to receive an enemy assault team. They are flying drones, okay? So for them, this is already an issue because if Russian assault troops, if only three or four or five of them are operating your depth, and Ukrainian units do try to hunt them down, because if they let any number escape, then they get to the drone units, then you start losing your drone units, your support personnel. It is a real issue in the battle space. So that’s essentially how infiltration works over time, although it’s incredibly costly for Russia. It’s a grim calculus.
Michael Kofman
But it’s a combination of that and also trying to fight for superiority in drone employment overall. Who has more drones? Who has more drone units in the fight? Who has more fire support? Who’s able to suppress whose drone units to then allow their offensive tactics to have some purchase and success?
Lex Fridman
Quick pause. There’s coffee downstairs for people just listening to this. This is late at night. We’re pushing through. This is amazing. Okay, we’re back. I guess I should also ask, what kind of drones are we talking about? So I just pulled out the, what is this? The Mini Pro-
Michael Kofman
It’s a great one.
Lex Fridman
… DJI drones. Five. How many drones like this are there? And also, I should mention that some of them have a cable for them, right? Fiber optic cable. And I think Preston, you’ve talked about throughout, throughout all this. At first, you were skeptical when you visited initially, but then you kind of saw the wisdom, the effectiveness of the, of fiber optic drones.
Preston Stewart
The fiber optics are terrifying in a lot of ways. But to answer your question, the Mavics, those are still utilized. All things considered, they’re relatively expensive compared to some other systems that Ukraine has. And those are not manufactured in Ukraine. And a lot of what they’re using right now, they’re building themselves. So FPVs are a bit bigger than that, but the term drone is so broad right now. I mean, all the way to describe effectively missiles that Russia is firing, and Ukraine is firing into Russia, that are the size of cars. So we’ve got everything from very, very big to very small and everything in between. The fiber optic one is interesting. So one of the major defenses against drones, and we use it in the U.S.
Preston Stewart
military, is jamming, electronic warfare, making it to where these munitions or anything doesn’t function in a certain area. And I think it was Russia originally that did it. Mike can correct me here, but they certainly rolled it out relatively quickly, and they attached a very thin fiber optic cable that spooled out of the drone back to the operator. And what that did then was it brought that signal internal, and their, the jammers stopped working. So all of the electronic warfare in the world isn’t doing anything. That drone flies directly through it. Now, the limitations are that there’s a cable behind this drone that as thin as it is, it does have some weight to it, which means a smaller payload or a-
Preston Stewart
… smaller distance or shorter distance that the drone can fly. Those can get hung up at times. But
Michael Kofman
We saw Russia roll that out. Ukraine quickly matched it, and that is a serious threat right now at longer and longer distances. I think we’ve seen them upwards of around 50 kilometers- … at this point.
Lex Fridman
The first time I heard this, I thought… It, it didn’t, it didn’t compute in my head. So you just said 50 kilometers. So that’s a very long cable. It’s a drone connected by a cable. It didn’t make any sense to me-
Michael Kofman
I know
Lex Fridman
… like that that could be a reality. Maybe this is a good place to kind of ask, like, the nature of war, which is figuring out different technologies that are actually effective on the ground. Like figuring out what’s effective even if it seems crazy.
Michael Kofman
Yeah, I mean, as Preston said, this… Ukrainians initially experimented with them, didn’t adopt them, but then Russia started adopting them pretty heavily after employing them in Kursk. When Ukraine had the Kursk offensive, that’s when Russian units really started first using fiber optic cables. They saw them as being effective. I’m demonstrating this as a case. As an example of a case at least. And once they saw that it was quite effective, impossible to jam, right? Because you literally have a cable attached to a drone, that the drone lays behind itself as it flies. Think of it like a very thin fiber optic cable filament, like on a fishing rod, the reel that you would use.
Lex Fridman
It’s about that width, too. It’s very thin.
Michael Kofman
It’s very thin, and it’s a spool like a reel on a fishing rod. That’s literally what the thing is on it. It’s a spool, and it’s just this cable’s coming out behind. You have to fly it carefully. You have to fly it slowly. You can’t fly it like your the drone you had here, this, this Mini Pro. You have to be more cautious because you have to think how the cable’s being laid on trees, on roads, on other things. You have to remember that you have a cable, not a radio signal connecting yourself to it. But nonetheless, it’s quite effective. And then it spread from the units using in Kursk because other units saw it as a successful practice. Once people see something that’s effective, they say, “I want to try that, too.” Then it spreads to other units.
Michael Kofman
Then, as Russians were using it, Ukrainian units began adopting it as well. Not at the same rate. Fiber optic cable drones are still a fairly small percentage of the overall tactical strike drones used, and I’m not sure. I hate to say I’m making this number up, but it’s 15% or less, I think, overall. That said, they play a very important role because you can’t jam them, and also they’re much more difficult to detect. Ukrainian units, everyone commonly has systems of detection force drones that are flown via an analog radio signal because it’s open and it’s easy to intercept. So you often have a device, for example, it’s nicknamed the Chuika, one type of it. I’ve always had one in the vehicle when driving.
Michael Kofman
There’s three antennas coming out of it which receive signal on three different frequency spectrums. And if there’s a drone coming towards you, the way things work is once a drone that’s using an analog radio signal is closer to you than to the operator, the signal strength can be stronger to you, so you can start to receive the signal from it, and you have like a little screen that you can see the video feed of an enemy drone coming. And with a fiber optic cable drone, you have nothing in terms of warning because you can’t receive that signal. But the way I look at it is that there’s been about a three to four-month cycle of evolution of technology and tactics in this war between Russian and Ukrainian forces, and they iterate fairly quickly.
Michael Kofman
So both sides have enough defense industrial capacity, enough capital, enough folks working on this, that if one side’s using something and it’s demonstrated to be effective, they assume and anticipate that the other side is going to begin to imitate them and adopt those technology capabilities. And usually the interaction between the two, and I’m very broad-brushing this, is when Ukraine has often led in terms of tactical development and bottom-up innovation because of the way Ukrainian units all experiment on their own and all have… They’re kind of all defense startups. They all have kind of their own R&D section. They have their own defense shop that’s, or company that’s building drones for them.
Michael Kofman
So technology tends to you know, bloom or like, I remember when EW was really exploding in 2023, 2024, and folks were calling it like an electronic warfare jungle because all these different systems were appearing. And so Ukraine tended to innovate faster. Russian military was slower, but Russia had in some ways more capacity and tended to be better at scaling a solution once they identified it, and this was Ukraine’s frustration. That once the Russian military identified something as effective and they saw that Ukraine is doing something well, they would then allocate capital, industrial capacity, scale it, deploy it across the force in a standardized way a bit faster. If I can add something to this, Lex, ’cause it’s an aspect of this that we just kind of…
Michael Kofman
And Mike did it here, and I do it all the time, too, is you just rattle it off like it’s normal, and it’s so far from normal. The Chuika drone detector, what that means is it looks like an old Game Boy. It has a screen on it. So you’re driving down the road in Ukraine, watching the screen. It turns on, and it is the enemy’s view of the drone. Is it your vehicle?
Michael Kofman
Or is it a different vehicle? And you will watch, you can watch as the enemy drone comes in at you. For soldiers in tree lines, they might be watching and trying to decide, “Does that drone see us? Do we need to move? It doesn’t see us. It’s looking the other direction.” It’s literally watching the feed of the Russian soldiers that are hunting you. That is just about everybody along the front has that right now. It’s just a weird dynamic that brand-new to war.
Lex Fridman
It beeps and when it picks up the signal, and so when you’re holding it, the… it’s not a pleasant feeling for everybody else in the vehicle that you can see it’s beeping, it’s picking up the signal on the enemy drone. And I have had times where folks seeing me looking at the screen, it’s a small screen, looking at the screen of the enemy drone, and then looking, you know, like, to your right to kind of look at your surroundings to see, is this
Michael Kofman
You know, is this like close to me? Is it kind of looking in the same area or not? So it is, it is exactly as Preston describes it.
Lex Fridman
So there’s a surreal aspect to this. It feels almost like video game-like with real life, life and death consequences. The soldiers on both sides are looking at screens, and then the whole world is looking at the screens that the soldier’s filming the thing. It just feels like the nature of war is completely different. Can you speak to the degree this war represents modern warfare and the future of modern warfare, and to what degree does it represents leftover from old way of fighting wars?
Preston Stewart
I think we’re at a transition point-
Preston Stewart
… right now. This war represents Russia and Ukraine. It is not representative of what every war in the world would look like should it spark today, tomorrow or next year. There’s just very unique aspects to this. The lack of air superiority on Russia’s part plays a major role in how the battlefield looks today. That may or may not be the situation that the U.S. military or NATO per se would be in, in another conflict. Maybe it would, but there’s a lot of dynamics at play here. So, it’s… We haven’t seen this in our lifetime, where we have… You know, one of the aspects of warfare is when people are fighting for their life day in and day out, they tend to come up with really good ways to stay alive and alternatively really good ways to kill the enemy.
Preston Stewart
Ways that you don’t come up with when you’re just between wars and thinking about what might be a good solution. So we are seeing rapid innovation in both Russia and Ukraine, and these are modern economies with modern technology. We’ve never, we haven’t seen this, in my lifetime at least. You know, the Taliban were innovating. Al-Qaeda was innovating. ISIS, they were innovating. The enemies that we fought were innovating. They didn’t have the scale to do it. They didn’t have this technology to do it. So we, it- I think we jumped decades in terms of what warfare will be in a very short period of time because of where it’s playing out.
Lex Fridman
As a thought experiment, how would the United States military fight this differently? Say there was no nuclear weapons on the table. You said something, air superiority. What does that mean?
Preston Stewart
So air superiority is the ability to conduct operations in an airspace pretty, pretty much at will. So very similar to Iraq and Afghanistan as we were fighting there. We had air power overhead at all times. They were really at no risk of being shot down or even suppressed to the point of not being able to carry out operations. What you’re seeing in Ukraine right now is air denial. Neither side is flying aircraft into enemy territory, and that’s been the case for a long time. The U.S. military is very much built around air power and delivering long range precision munitions and a lot of munitions from B-1 bombers, B-2 bombers, things like that onto enemy positions.
Lex Fridman
But by the way, small tangent, which branch of the military is responsible for drones? I would love to know, like you were at West Point, is there like set of courses now on drones, on drone warfare?
Preston Stewart
They’re getting there.
Lex Fridman
So is that part of the Air Force? Is that part of air power? Does that count as air power, or is that not?
Preston Stewart
We’re figuring it out-
Lex Fridman
Okay
Preston Stewart
… I think is the best way to put it, and it’s, this is the thing, that it’s, it’s happening so fast, right? They haven’t had the opportunity to create new courses and then put cadets through this for three or four years at a point because there’s new technology right now that wasn’t necessarily being utilized just 18 months ago. So the Pentagon is working on this. We’ve seen a lot of kind of press releases and positive statements about the direction we’re headed. There’s a drone dominance program right now that the military is spearheading, trying to identify small manufacturers that can be agile and come up with new solutions to field to the broader force. We’re trying to catch up in a lot of ways.
Preston Stewart
In terms of who owns it, I don’t know that that answer is there yet. It seems like everybody’s got a little piece of it. But that’s part of it. We’re trying to work our way through it right now.
Lex Fridman
But the U.S. military is embracing this, this new small drone. Like to what degree is this an intermediate stage of having these kind of ad hoc drones? Is this an intermediate stage of something else that’s coming, or is this going to be the new way of fighting these kinds of wars?
Michael Kofman
That’s a good question. There’s debate whether an analogy is maybe like aviation of World War I, where we see the Russia-Ukraine war as a transitional war, like Preston described it. It starts off as a actually fairly traditional 20th century war with two forces that are principally artillery armies, that are both successor armies to the Soviet military, which was an artillery army. And much is decided in the war through interaction artillery, armor, anti-tank guided missiles, and a lot of modernized Soviet equipment. If you were around in ’70s and 1980s, you would have recognized most of the things on the battlefield in 2022 through 2024. In fact, most of the equipment NATO sent was also what NATO had made all the way from ’60s to, you know, the ’90s.
Michael Kofman
And then drones evolve quite rapidly and really start to mature over the course of this war. And the question is, are we close to this final stage of maturity, or will we see a substantial reduction of how much manpower is involved? Would drones become much more autonomous to the benefit of both a different set of technology and artificial intelligence being used for navigation, guidance, what have you? And how relevant is that to the wars we plan to fight and also the way we want to fight? Every military has its own conception of its contingencies, the scenarios that it has in mind, and also an idea of how it wants to fight. And here’s the challenge, because first, how do we know when we’re looking at a war that what we see is generalizable to other wars?
Michael Kofman
Every war has its own context, right? Its own geography. This was a principally land war with an air and a sea component. Second, there’s always an issue of when you’re looking at prolonged conventional war, what part of the war do you want to draw lessons from? Because most wars of this type, they start out with this dynamic, intense phase, the clash of forces, reconciliation of military plans. But then they often do become positional, attritional in nature, right? Forces dig in. There’s way more troops on the battlefield. Everything’s mined. It’s very hard to break through. And drones really came into their own more in these latter phases, right?
Michael Kofman
So sometimes people make the mistake of they look at the latter phase, the late parts of a war, and think, “Okay, this is how the next war will start.” But the next opening phase of a war is often different than kind of the middle phase where both sides enter this dynamic that they’re trying to break out of. I think for the United States part of our challenge is that we actually are tactically an incredibly skilled force, right? We spend a lot of money on our military, on the training for our military, and the quality of our personnel. And Preston’s absolutely right.
Michael Kofman
We spend a tremendous amount of funding on the expeditionary air component of our force because it’s the best combination of mobility and firepower on the battlefield, which then enables the rest of the force to conduct combined arms maneuver. And what I mean by that is if you think of the different combat arms, right, infantry, armor, artillery, if you think of aviation in combination with that, that force works together, right? All those pieces are interacting with each other, supporting each other dynamically on the battlefield.
Michael Kofman
And one of the big advantages of our force is not just technology, not just training of personnel, but the fact that we can run a complex operation, have these pieces working together, at least ideally and be able to achieve a much greater effect from the fact that these pieces are interacting, they’re much better coordinated. And lastly, one of the biggest separators of modern militaries is whether or not you can do the things you’re doing in exercise or in a small scenario against a permissive environment, like let’s say you’re fighting the Taliban. I’m not saying that wasn’t a challenge, but nonetheless it’s quite different having a fight like that than facing the largest conventional war Europe has seen since World War II, right?
Michael Kofman
The ability to scale operations, complex operations, is a big limiter for other militaries. In fact, the Russian military really struggled with this extensively at the beginning of this war. To maybe make an analogy to folks not in military affairs, it’s one thing to run a business with, you know, 10 employees. It’s another thing to run a corporation with 10 or 20,000, right? The complexity scales. And I don’t know anything about running corporations, but I imagine there’s a great deal more complexity to it than something like a small business, even though in principle you’re still running a business operation. So I use this kind of analogy to explain that this is in some ways how the United States is very much advantaged.
Michael Kofman
But if you’re interested, there are some open-ended questions based on what we saw in this war if we need to adapt, if we need to change the way we operate. There is a degree of uncertainty if our traditional advantages will offer the same benefits in a future war if that war features this technology on the battlefield. And one thing we do know is that our opponents like Russia do plan to fight in this way. We already have a sense of how they plan to fight because we see how they’re fighting in this war, right? As, you know, that, as Gibson used to say, “The future’s already here. It’s not evenly distributed,” right? So we already see that this, you know, this is already here on the battlefield in Europe.
Who is winning the war?
Lex Fridman
An absurdly large question, but who is winning this war right now? And maybe a better version of that question is what is a good measure of how to score the war in terms of the military balance of power and effectiveness? So territory gain, casualties, quality of each army, maybe other measures. Who’s winning this war right now?
Preston Stewart
I’ll tackle it. Honestly, Lex, I, it’s a, it’s a question I- … generally avoid. I understand where the question comes from. People want to have a very clear and concise where do things stand right now. But the challenge is this isn’t like a football game where both teams, you’re looking at the scoreboard, who has more points at the end of 60 minutes, and that’s the winner. And you can say whoever has more points at 55 minutes, they’re that much closer, because Russia and Ukraine in this case are fighting for different things. They have different objectives. You could overly simplify it and say that Russia is trying to take Ukraine, and that Ukraine is trying to maintain their sovereignty, but then you just go down a rabbit hole of what is success or what is-
Preston Stewart
… what is the fact that Ukraine still exists today to a degree is winning. But they have lost some territory that they don’t appear on the verge of getting back. That is not winning. So it’s difficult. The other thing I would say with that is when you look at historical conflicts, say World War II, Nazi Germany was winning that war for the majority of it until they weren’t, and then they quickly lost. Uh, Imperial Japan was winning much of World War II in the Pacific. They were unstoppable if you looked at, if you took a snapshot in time, and then all of a sudden things turned, they were losing, and they lost. So the winning, losing in the middle of a conflict, I feel like you could paint that, honestly, something like this, in whichever direction you would prefer.
Lex Fridman
Is it fair to say that either side can collapse quickly, so ties can turn dramatically?
Preston Stewart
Historically, we have seen that. I don’t know that there’s a lot of evidence right now. I think there was a lot of expectations early on that Ukraine would be the country to collapse, and there’s been countless analysts just, you know, “They’re on the verge. This winter’s gonna be it. This summer’s gonna be it,” and, and, and they’re still holding. There’s no indications that either one is on the verge of collapse, but some sort of large change to dynamically shift the conflict. You know, the Prigozhin-Wagner march on Moscow, there was the possibility there. Maybe that would’ve been the thing that would’ve brought about not necessarily a Russian collapse, but a Russian inability to continue to project power into Ukraine. But-
Lex Fridman
Black Swan event is probably a little too much, but it’s that type of thing that could precipitate a major change in the direction the war is going.
Michael Kofman
Yeah. I don’t see either side right now being able to impose the kind of collapse I think you’re thinking of. And, and part of the reason is just the way they’re fighting, and the interaction between the two forces isn’t really conducive to producing that. It’s very hard to generate the level of momentum and exploit battlefield conditions to really to really kind of force a collapse on the side. Although, as I often say, you know, we have to be mindful. Wars unfold in phases, right? So there are these periods where one side has the initiative. Russia held the initiative for a long period of time. Now in 2026, we see actually Ukraine increasingly has the initiative on parts of the front and is imposing real challenges on the Russian armed forces.
Michael Kofman
You could say that for a time Ukraine has been advantaged this year on the battlefield. The debate we have as analysts is, is that going to be a lasting advantage, is that a secular trend, or is that a window of opportunity for Ukraine? Because, just because you’re advantaged, like Russia might have been in ’24 and ’25, it doesn’t mean that that will hold, that will last. You see that the way one side fights can reach diminishing returns and become cost ineffective. That’s what happened to Russia in 2025. You see much of it is an interaction between the two forces, adaptation, new technology comes along. Both sides are experimenting with different ways to fight. And so this is… You know, I think for neither of us is, this is not a cop-out.
Michael Kofman
I think as analysts there is always a tendency to admire the problem. But if you say somebody’s winning, it often sets for people, and certainly any audience, expectations. Most people think if you say someone’s winning, that that side’s going to win. In the conventional world, it’s very hard to see things forward even a couple of months because so much is contingent that you can only say Ukraine’s advantaged on the ground right now. But Ukraine also faces a very, very significant challenge from the Russian strike campaign. None of us are sure how this winter is going to go. We’re not, we’re not sure how cold the winter is going to be. That’s a big factor, too. And other factors are at play. What other wars will happen?
Michael Kofman
The US war with Iran had a material and political impact on this war, right? So we don’t know what other things will take place around the world that may shape this war because there are all sorts of countries that are de facto material parties to the war or very significantly engaged in supporting the countries fighting this war. So there’s just a great deal of factors to consider.
Lex Fridman
When you analyze the war, maybe you can speak to the levels of analysis that are most important to you that, that we should be thinking about. So I’ve spoken to a bunch of historians like James Holland, who analyzes, for example, World War II, the Western Front, the Eastern Front- Focused on the Western Front from all the different levels, you know, tactical, strategic, operational. There’s of course the political, geopolitical. There’s, you know, the supply chain, all this kinda… Down to geography and weather, like you mentioned winter. So what, what are some of the levels of analysis that are important here in this particular war?
Michael Kofman
I mean, I think for a military analyst, you know, there’s, you know, at least three levels, and then there’s the central political level that’s also central to understand. But the way I look at first, tactical level of analysis, right? That’s the nitty-gritty battlefield details, what’s happening on the ground in these specific fights. How are the two sides fighting at this tactical level? How are force employed? We covered quite a bit of that in the conversation already. How are, how does infantry advance? How are drones being employed? You know, correlation of forces and day-to-day battlefield changes. They inform your understanding of how the war is being fought, and also they help set your expectations for what’s likely to happen in the months ahead.
Michael Kofman
They’re also relevant because even though the war is not going to be decided by who advances the next 5 or 10 kilometers, that this tactical level war very much informs the strategic. Why? It sets expectations among military and political leaders for who has greater bargaining power, who has leverage, who is succeeding on the battlefield, provides information to the negotiations between the two sides as well, right? So to some extent, we can’t overly fixate on the map, but the map is important. And you can see who is adapting, who is not adapting, and actually is increasingly suffering greater casualties and battlefield reversals, which in this case, 2026 is Russia. Let’s take the operational level.
Michael Kofman
And first, I’ll say this is a thorny subject in military circles because I know plenty of people military side that don’t think there’s a discrete operational level of war. They think that there’s operational art, but there isn’t such thing as a separate operational level of war. We should not get into that discussion here.
Lex Fridman
Oh, so you’re saying that some people listening to this who are very angry hearing you even say operational like it’s this discrete layer.
Michael Kofman
I would not say they were angry, but I can imagine a host of army majors getting ready to debate this as I bring the topic up.
Lex Fridman
Okay. Okay.
Michael Kofman
So let’s just stop it-
Lex Fridman
Okay
Michael Kofman
… and say, look, there are different ways of looking at operational level of war, but there is such a thing as operations and the conduct of operations, right? Which is important. And this is much more the organization of intelligence, logistics, fire support, the coordination of different units in a coherent action with a clear objective, right? And ideally, the operations then link what you’re trying to achieve in terms of the objectives of the operations with the political goals of the actual war, right? Ideally, the military strategy takes the operations and connects them to the political goals of the war. So you’re not just conducting successful military operations, but they have a clear purpose in terms of the political objectives you’re trying to achieve.
Michael Kofman
And operations are things that are phased, they are planned, they involve coordinating a whole host of units, but they have a clear objective behind them. They have a sequencing. You know, they’ve thought through how they’re going to set the conditions, how the breaching force is going on, who’s the second echelon. If you meet with success, who’s going to exploit that success? If you don’t meet with success, what are the different alternative courses of actions you’re going to take? And then ultimately, how are you going to consult, right? So it has a lot of moving pieces. This is what staffs usually plan, and often they’re looking at bigger size formations. If we were talking earlier about Infantrymen, squads, platoons, companies. This is more at the size of armies, you know, or corps.
Michael Kofman
And then above that, we have military strategy. It’s, at its core level, it’s a theory of success, right? There’s some coherence to the logic of what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. There are choices being made. It reveals itself often best actually in what you’re choosing not to do rather than what you’re choosing to do. That’s often the most interesting part for me as an analyst. There’s some sequencing involved. You’ve thought through the sequencing of actions. And ideally, it links the actual operations you’re doing and planning with the political goals of the war that you receive from your political leaders, right? You know, Preston, you want to add a bit more to that. But military strategy to me is always one of the more interesting topics, at least intellectually. It’s…
Michael Kofman
And it’s often kind of debated, you know, what, to what extent, what is the military strategy, how you understand the military strategy. But this level is important too.
Lex Fridman
So I always wonder at the, at every layer but the strategy layer, how much does strategy look like I apologize, but Pinky and the Brain, there’s that cartoon where, you know, what are we going to do today? Is we’re going to take over the world. You kind of assume everything goes flawlessly and it’s kind of this dramatic picture of success versus how much planning is there for all the different contingencies, levels of including complete failure. It’s like how much of the different trajectories are considered?
Michael Kofman
Strategy in theory, first, it’s a plan that you’re not going to change quickly or often because otherwise it’s not much of a strategy. But any good strategy must have core planning assumptions, and if those assumptions are proven wrong, you should expect to adjust. Actually, a lot of times strategy goes poorly is when people are trying to execute a strategy even though their assumptions are clearly wrong. I can think of some wars we’ve been in that looked a bit like that. Second, the strategy is iterative, so it’s interacting with the strategy of your opponent, right? And so ideally, you’re iterating, you’re looking at what your opponent’s strategy is, how your strategy is performing against what they’re trying to do, and then you’re changing it over time, right?
Michael Kofman
But unlike tactics which change quickly and have to keep pace with technology, and tactics inform strategy. If strategy is divorced from tactics, then it’s a great staff planning exercise. It may be very well written, but the force can’t execute that strategy, right? And alternatively, if you just have tactics, you’re just fighting battles, then you don’t have a campaign, okay? You have maybe good ways of fighting a war, but you haven’t thought through how you’re going to win it. You don’t have a campaign thought through. It’s not obvious how the battles you’re fighting are going to aggregate to military success.
Military analysis of Russia’s 2022 invasion
Lex Fridman
Maybe we could take, given everything you laid out now as a case study, the invasion of 2022, February 24th. What were the failures and what were the effective decisions on the Russian side and the Ukrainian side in the early days, in the early months of the war? Maybe, Mike, you could also talk about what you predicted and what turned out to be a correct prediction and what turned out to be not a correct prediction.
Michael Kofman
Yeah, absolutely. So first, I think amongst community of military analysts and folks who were looking at the situation in 2021, I was definitely one of the people that thought Russia was preparing a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine. And even though we weren’t certain, and I wasn’t certain of exactly how they would do it or what it would look like, so there were definitely gaps in information. It’s rare where you have perfect knowledge of the adversary’s plans. Although the U.S.
Michael Kofman
intelligence community had great knowledge of Russia’s plans and were releasing that information throughout the Russian military buildup, it was a very difficult time because first, many folks did not want to believe that what they were seeing on the ground, the Russian military buildup and the rhetoric leading up to it, was truly a buildup to a full-scale invasion. In fact, I learned as an analyst that even if all the pieces kind of look right, people naturally want to believe it’s anything other than that. This is a very inconvenient truth. And there were a host of countries and allies the United States had that had a different interpretation of the evidence, like Germany and others in Europe.
Michael Kofman
And to be frank, Ukrainian political leadership also had real misgivings about the likelihood of a full-scale invasion. People thought if there was going to be a breakout of conflict again, that it would just be narrowly focused on the Donbas region and that much of the Russian buildup was meant to coerce Ukraine. It was meant to be a part of course of diplomacy or to distract Ukrainian forces. So there were competing interpretations. I want to be clear about this. And people had different contingencies in mind. Some thought it might be just another Russian attempt to seize the Donbas. Some thought it might be something larger trying to capture parts of eastern Ukraine. And some did think it was going to be a Russian attempt to take most of the country.
Michael Kofman
So I think I was amongst the folks that predicted the invasion early on, Russian intentions and, and the scope of the operation, but not the way they were going to do it. Because there, I think we over-rationalized the way Russian military would actually conduct the operation, not seeing how the military strategy and the plan, the concept of operations, would be tied to Russian political assumptions. And the Russian political assumptions were that Russian intelligence had set the conditions in Ukraine for a speedy takeover.
Michael Kofman
The Russian troops would be greeted as liberators, okay? That they could conduct essentially a coup de main, that they could very rapidly advance into Ukraine, encircle the capital, either capture or isolate Ukrainian political leadership, and that even though there would be an initial phase of combat operations, it would be brief, and that they could get Ukrainian forces to a large extent surrender or isolate them. These are the Russian assumptions. I’m being clear about that. And that then they could quickly move to a stabilization occupation phase.
Michael Kofman
And all that stemmed from the fact that at the end of the day, that Vladimir Putin did not see Ukraine as a real independent country with a separate national identity, and really had not learned or updated his views at all from the real beginning of the war, which was 2014, right? And we know this because he actually wrote many of them in a July article in 2021. If we go back to that, folks who are interested, it was published. And he laid out a whole series of views of how he saw Ukraine, how he saw the sort of ongoing frozen conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and his assumptions were fairly clear. I don’t think we did a good enough job of tying those assumptions to thinking through how Russia might actually do this kind of operation.
Michael Kofman
And secondarily, the toughest thing to predict, the interaction between the two forces. Here, it’s not a case of overestimating the Russian military, just underestimating the Ukraine military, although I think there’s a fair argument to be said that we overestimated how Russian military would perform in this case. We underestimated how the Ukraine military would perform in the initial opening of the war, in part because we knew far less about the Ukraine military. I’m gonna be very frank about that. Most expertise is usually against adversary forces. We don’t have nearly as much expertise amongst ally, for allies and partners. That’s just the nature of the field and, and the profession we work in.
Michael Kofman
And secondarily, I think actually more was known about Russian plans to attack than Ukrainian plans to defend. So there’s a degree of anchoring bias that information has when you do analysis. But also much was contingent. So Ukrainian forces perform, not only did they perform much better, but Ukrainian volunteers showed up to fight in those early moments. But it was a very chaotic early period of the war, the initial clash and reconciliation of the Russian invasion and, and the Ukrainian defense. I think one challenge that analysts have and folks who look at analysis is in understanding that military power by itself cannot be abstracted.
Michael Kofman
I often see it abstracted in conversations, a sense the United States is number one and China’s number two and Russia’s maybe number three or four or five, wherever you, you wanna put it. But there’s no such thing. Military power requires a context to express itself, right? So if you’re thinking of a potential, let’s say, battle between United States and China over Taiwan, you have one scenario in mind, okay? If you’re thinking of maybe a war between China and India, you have a different scenario in mind. So this, this abstraction isn’t helpful. It actually really matters what the scenario is because the geography matters, the political objectives matter.
Michael Kofman
They will drive the military strategy and the concept of operations, and that will then heavily decide how the forces will be employed, which is the most important thing here. And so sometimes what happens is you may know something about a military, or you may even know quite a bit about both militaries, but knowing something about militaries is not the same as knowing how the two of them will interact in a particular fight. And that is subject to a lot of individual choices, political choices, military choices, and also a great deal of serendipity and chance, things that are contingent. I’ll say this about the opening of the war.
Michael Kofman
As poorly thought through the Russian invasion was, and as unworkable as their assumptions were, you know, in many cases, the Ukrainian defense itself was improvised. And so that first clash was, in my view, contingent on a whole series of choices and, and early battles that went a certain way. And we’ll continue to debate this military history for a long time. You know, I think I and other folks who are interested in military history, we still debate what happened in World War II, what happened in World War I, what happened in the Napoleonic Wars. The reason I bring this up is for a degree of humility, this war is hardly over. We still have a long ways to go to piece together what happened exactly and why.
Michael Kofman
And often we don’t have a great understanding of the probability of a timeline, because people naturally assume that whatever timeline they’re living in, whatever happened, was the likeliest series of events to take place. They rarely ever assume that they’re living in a fortunate version of that timeline. So I’ll stop there in this sort of discussion of what we thought and the initial reconciliation of the Russian plan to invade and Ukrainian plan to defense. I learned a great deal myself professionally as an analyst, I’ll be honest, watching it, particularly from the things that… Not from the things necessarily they got right, but from the things they got wrong. I think you end up learning far more from what you get wrong professionally.
Lex Fridman
What surprised you the most?
Michael Kofman
What surprised me the most first, how the Russians actually conceived of this operation. The fact that they had fairly leverage and fairly brittle force without any real plan B. There’s no hedge in their invasion plan. Second, how poorly they performed at the tactical level, just in terms of capability, quality of the force. And it’s difficult to judge seeing a military going through a series of military reforms and modernization, how they might perform in a large scale conventional war if you haven’t seen a large scale conventional war. But I think there was definitely an intervening period where we overrated them, which is a tendency when looking at adversaries, because we tend to worst case them. I’ll be very honest.
Michael Kofman
This is often a professional assumption that it’s better to worst case and assume that adversaries can do the things they would like to do and the things they talk about doing, and maybe get that wrong, in which case your own forces have a good day. They perform much better than the opposite version, right? Strategic surprise, Pearl Harbor, where you underestimate your opponent, and the result of you underestimating your opponent is disastrous, right?
Lex Fridman
Yeah, and I guess there’s a bunch of things when you speak into the reality of war just went wrong. Like there’s the columns of tanks going towards Kyiv that weren’t effective. There’s… When you take a military force and it connects with the reality of the geography, the situation. Then you get, actually get to see which were the effective tactical decisions, and that was the illustration of that.
Michael Kofman
Well, ultimately, you have the interaction between the two forces and the decisions that both sides make. And I think that definitely the initial prediction that Russia would succeed in this conventional phase of the war because it looked like, you know, they had superiority in deployed forces. Ukrainian military was fairly late to mobilize, and much of the Ukrainian military assumptions seemed to be that the focus of the Russian invasion would come in the Donbas, and that’s where a lot of units were deployed. Many units were not there available to either defend in the south, to even check the Russian advance from Crimea or in the north. In fact, there were almost no regular military units north of Kyiv to stop the advance from Belarus.
Michael Kofman
So it was difficult to assess the interaction of those plans. I look back on it, and I think I learned a tremendous amount, so did other analysts. And it’s a case that I think we’re gonna continue to study. But this was just the very initial period of the war. What’s interesting is I think military analysts got much better in correcting expectations, and then predictions for follow-on offensives and counter-offensives became much more accurate once we saw the two forces in the fight.
Lex Fridman
Preston, what surprised you most about the beginning of the war as you look back now, especially as that war has evolved?
Preston Stewart
Well, there was something right out the gate, Lex, that I think is still there today, and it shows this difference between, we’ll call it the Soviet military mindset and the Western mindset, and we hadn’t really seen this in play. In my experience, again, fighting the global war on terror, it’s not, you weren’t running up against a conventional force that was operating in any way similar to how we were. We push authority down and allow junior leaders to make decisions in the moment. The whole idea is you have a commander’s intent. This is what we’re trying to accomplish and why, the task and purpose and all of that.
Preston Stewart
And down the chain of command, the soldiers, the individuals have the authority to make a decision on the spot to decide, “I need to go left,” or, “I need to dig in,” or, “I need to call for reinforcements,” or, “I need to retrograde.” That is pushed down to the lowest possible level to where we’ve got, you know, 18, 19-year-old kids making these incredible decisions in combat.
Lex Fridman
We should say for a little bit of context that you served in Afghanistan.
Preston Stewart
Yes.
Lex Fridman
And maybe you can connect some of the experiences you remember from that, what things you’ve seen in terms of examples of how a Western force operates.
Preston Stewart
Well, that was very dispersed. We were spread across a lot of small bases in Afghanistan, so you had captains and below, sometimes 24, 25-year-olds, making daily life and death decisions for a lot of people, and we would push that down to 20-year-old staff sergeants or sergeants that were making a decision that could cost the lives of their men.
Lex Fridman
So you’re saying like a 19-year-old, 20-year-old, if they have a good idea, if they have a good decision, that has power?
Preston Stewart
Yeah, there’s a lot of leadership involved with that, ’cause you can’t just grab a random guy and say, “We’re gonna let you make whatever decision you want.” But through the training and through the kind of briefings from the top down, from brigade to battalion to company-level commanders to the squad leader, making sure that your people know this is what we’re doing. This is the mission, and this is what we’re trying to accomplish, so they have a full understanding. So then when something inevitably goes sideways, they’re not stuck like the Russian army was- … trying to advance on Kyiv. Where, when they got stuck, they stopped.
Preston Stewart
There was a shocking number of senior Russian officers killed in the opening few weeks of the war because they kept having to go closer and closer to the front to essentially move traffic jams. Because they didn’t have the as they went down the ranks, whereas we have, and, and you know, again, this was a Ukrainian victory, to be clear.
Preston Stewart
The US and NATO had been doing some work in training Ukraine for some time, and in some units, it kind of instilled this idea of junior leadership and empowering your junior soldiers to where if they don’t have an order, they still know what the mission is, and they’re able to make the best decision on the spot. We didn’t see that from Russia, and I would argue that we’re still seeing that today. On the Ukrainian side, there is a crazy amount of innovation. I know we’ve talked about it with drones, but even the tactics on how they’re gonna advance in certain are- it’s different from one unit to the next. A lot of that is driven from the bottom up, which is a very Western military type thing, whereas on the Russian side, it’s still, to today, is still top-down driven.
Preston Stewart
They are given their orders. They are given their place on a map. Go there. So that was surprising to see for me right out the gate, and I think it’s pretty notable. I think as the war, you know, hopefully wraps up before too long here, I think that’s gonna be a big takeaway is that that method is preferred of pushing the authority as far down the chain of command as you possibly can.
Michael Kofman
Yeah, absolutely. And but that’s both a conversation about leadership and military culture. And I think in looking in the Russian military before this war, the gaps of knowledge we may have had on how they would fight were filled with what we knew about doctrine, operational concepts, and more should have been done to fill the gaps looking at military culture and some of the real deficits and shortcomings in terms of military culture and leadership style that is preferred in the Russian armed forces. And one could easily say that when looking at the Ukrainian military, we could have done a much better job learning more about the Ukrainian armed forces before the war to get better estimation on how they would fight.
Michael Kofman
But in many cases, talking to Ukrainian colleagues, at the end of the day, you find that a lot of these battles, a lot of these interactions were the result of initiative of units, of commanders in those early days, and it was quite chaotic and the success of volunteers, of troops, and people who essentially mobilized themselves to fight and join the forces and filled the ranks early on, swelled the ranks in order to muster that defense.
Battle of Bakhmut
Lex Fridman
You’ve written about Prigozhin’s mutiny in ’23. What does that teach us about the structure of the Russian military? And going to Perplexity here, the Prigozhin mutiny was a short-lived armed rebellion led by the Wagner mercenary chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in Russia on June 23rd and 24th, 2023.
Michael Kofman
Yeah, a well-known character from well before this war to people who followed Russia, and particularly the role of Wagner in other wars like the Syrian Civil War, and their deployments to Africa and parts of the Middle East. But Prigozhin rose to prominence, certainly amongst Western audience, from outspokenness and public criticism and the conflict that he developed with the Minister of Defense at the time, Sergei Shoigu, and the Chief of General Staff, Valery Gerasimov. Maybe to quickly track at least how I remember the role of Wagner in this war is Wagner comes in early on in 2022. They get paired up with the Russian airborne. They show some success in May of 2022 at a town in Bakhmut called Popasna.
Michael Kofman
They then are expanded in terms of the role in this war, and Prigozhin is given the authority by the Russian government to go recruit from Russian prisons. And he starts hiring convicts to build out special convict-staffed assault formations, assault groups within Wagner. So the size of Wagner grows in assault force. And Wagner is thrown then into a fight for a city called Bakhmut, and enters a grinding fight for the city. And I think you could periodize the battle, technically maybe starts August or so, and it runs through fall of 2022, winter all the way till May.
Lex Fridman
We should say that’s one of the most important battles in the war.
Michael Kofman
It is one of the most important battles, particularly in the early period of the war, certainly.
Lex Fridman
Can you actually take a small tangent and just what are your memories of that? Can you describe what that battle was, and what did, what did it teach you about war? What did it teach you about this particular war?
Michael Kofman
So the fight around Bakhmut was, in some respects, a siege, a classical siege, because you had both a battle for the city, and you had a decisive battle around the city to try to control the roads, the ground lines of communications into the city. And what was happening to Bakhmut, the reason why at that time period, this is going back to February, March of 2023, the reason why Ukrainian defense of Bakhmut increasingly looked precarious, it wasn’t the urban battle for the city. In the city, you had essentially a city that was divided by a small river running through it, and there was a kind of residential eastern side to it, and there’s a more urban and industrial side to the city. And the city, actually, I wanna be clear, this is a nice city.
Michael Kofman
I have a friend who was in the Peace Corps in the city. He knows it much better than I ever did. But Bakhmut is a sort of medium-sized city, but not a known one in Ukraine. So you had industrial zones. You had nine-story apartment buildings. You know, those of us who originally were born or grew up in the Soviet Union can remember them well. And you had a kind of eastern residential area on the eastern side of the river. And then you had terrain that was raised above the city. The city itself was kind of on a punch bowl. It was on lower terrain. It was not an easy place to defend because the terrain was higher, both in front, east of it, and west of it, right?
Michael Kofman
And so what happens, Russian forces end up occupying the positions east of it, and then you have essentially two battles that take place. One is for Bakhmut, as Russian forces steadily enter Bakhmut from the eastern side, make progress from east to west. And the other one’s a siege around the city, because most sieges, if you want to take a city, you have to interdict, you have to control your enemy’s ability to reinforce the city, and you have to take control of the logistics, right? Otherwise, they’ll keep reinforcing it, and it’s going to be a very long fight in the slog. And so Ukrainian forces were essentially fighting two battles. And in some ways, the more important one was the battle to prevent encirclement of the city.
Michael Kofman
And at that time, very briefly, where I happened to be there with Ukrainian forces, Russian military had gone around the northern side of the city and was really close to interdicting one of the main roads running down from Chasiv Yar, this crumble road, and in part because another town fell north of Bakhmut called Soledar. This smaller city had fallen, and so the flank, essentially the left flank, began to give, right, in this battle. And then the right flank slowly began to give as well, as Russian forces entered the eastern part and then the southeastern part. And the city, like many cities that face a battle like this, essentially saw systematic destruction. This was still very much an artillery and infantry and tank fight.
Michael Kofman
There were infantry fighting vehicles, BMP-2s directly firing 30-millimeter cannon in the city. There were tanks that came into the city, would be direct firing down the street at buildings, enemy positions. And you had close-quarters combat between infantry, fighting from buildings to buildings. You could picture this as a fairly, in some ways, a traditional urban fight. But on top of that, you also had drones. You had light bomber drones at this time. FPVs were just being experimented with in winter of 2023. You didn’t really see them at this point of the fight. But the battle was a grinding fight. Wagner was throwing constant assault groups, exhausting the Ukrainian defense with convict infantry. And many of them would get killed, but Ukrainian units would get tired.
Michael Kofman
They’d run out of ammo. And then Wagner would send more experienced troops. And Russian airborne essentially secured the flanks, and they were providing artillery support to them as well. So it wasn’t just Wagner fighting, although Prigozhin liked to take all the credit for the fight. In reality, it was Wagner, a large amount of artillery support because the Russian military had a significant fires advantage, artillery advantage in this fight as well. And this is what was leveling a lot of the city. And it also had elements of Russian airborne securing the flanks. That way Wagner could focus on the fight for the actual city itself. And it was a grinding battle. It was very much a traditional battle that ultimately saw the destruction of the city.
Michael Kofman
By the time Russian forces took it, there was very little of the city left if you see images of it now. I will say it’s, from my point of view, not only is it a tragedy, but this is the fate that many other cities have suffered in Ukraine. Essentially, in some ways, Russian forces at the end of the battle took nothing because there was very little of the city left to take.
Lex Fridman
And you’ve referred to the Bakhmut syndrome.
Michael Kofman
So Bakhmut syndrome is Bakhmut became a fixing point in the war at a critical period because what was happening in the war around this fight is in the fall, Ukraine had two remarkably successful offensive operations. One was in Kharkiv, where Russian military literally routed, and the other one was in Kherson, which was much more slow going and plotting, but nonetheless forced the Russian military to withdraw and retreat from the western side of the Dnipro riverbank. They were both successful, and they began to set the expectation that actually this could be a shorter war, that Ukraine could achieve a military victory in this war. And the Russian military then tried to use Bakhmut as essentially a fixing fight, but employing Wagner, which were kind of the expendables in this battle.
Michael Kofman
Prigozhin may not have seen him and his forces that way, but certainly that’s the way they, they were being used. And it became a grinding fight. And as it became a grinding, grinding fight over time, it started to sap morale. But battles like this take on political significance. I personally think that the loss of Bakhmut wasn’t all that important or meaningful. In fact, I don’t just think that, I know that because it took the Russian military a whole year to get from Bakhmut to Chasiv Yar, the next town over on higher terrain.
Lex Fridman
Still fighting for it.
Michael Kofman
And it took them even another year to take a large part of Chasiv Yar, okay? And if you look at where they are from Bakhmut, distance-wise, on the map, it’s not far. So one can safely now argue, I think the evidence is in, incontrovertibly, that the loss of Bakhmut wasn’t nearly, wasn’t nearly that critical at the end of the day.
Lex Fridman
Critical for the broader strategy of the war. So why, why over-fixate on Bakhmut?
Michael Kofman
Well, the challenge is that battles become politically significant even if tactically they might not be justifiably freighted with that significance.
Lex Fridman
And political when you mean, is it like Stalingrad in, in the- … World War II? Because certain leaders up atop, there’s certain fixation on a particular city as a symbol.
Michael Kofman
Yes. The battle for Bakhmut to me was one freighted with political significance because it was a contest, right? And wars by their nature are fundamentally contests of wills, and they’re contests of systems between states. And these then become bellwether events. And what happens is political leaders often see the battle as significant. Maybe the city itself is not critical, but they can’t afford to lose it. Why? It became very important for Ukraine because Ukraine heavily dependent on external support, on Western support, and wanted to maintain the perception after successful offensives in the fall that the war was going their way, that they had the momentum, okay?
Michael Kofman
And believed that further expectations of support, the equipment they wanted to receive, the additional capabilities and training they wanted to receive, would be tied to the sense in Western countries that Ukraine is winning. And so they were very concerned. This happens all the time. Wars are full of sunk cost fallacies in this pathology of thinking. Naturally very concerned that the loss of Bakhmut would lead to a turn in sort of Western public sentiment and the views of political decision-makers in Western countries. And so there was this whole campaign organized called Fortress Bakhmut.
Michael Kofman
I always worry when any city, especially a fairly small city, is declared a fortress, because then it means that forces there will not be able to withdraw or retrograde in a timely manner. Most people who end up in those battles, I know from Ukrainian troops, also always worry when, you know, something’s declared a fortress because then they know that’s going to be a pretty tough, pretty tough and bitter fight. But essentially what happened was this became a prolonged attritional fight over Bakhmut. Ukraine was able to draw the fight out, but I’m not sure necessarily to their benefit. And what happened was it tied down quite a few units in the fight for Bakhmut.
Michael Kofman
And this is an ongoing debate to what extent did the battle for Bakhmut expend very experienced troops in exchange for holding onto a town for some extra period of time. But on the other side, the Russian military was fighting with these expendable Wagner forces. A lot of them were convicts. Second, to what extent it pulled in forces that then could have been used and trained, that were very experienced, that could have been used and actually trained on Western equipment, and could have led the summer offensive in June of 2023, instead of having green, new, inexperienced troops with the better Western equipment, but nonetheless lacking experience, having to conduct a very difficult breaching operation. So all these questions remain. I know we’ll continue to debate them.
Michael Kofman
But the bottom line was Bakhmut Syndrome. It was essentially choosing to defend the city past the point when it made sense. And that would often happen because it’s very difficult to withdraw from a population center, right? Population centers often fix fights. That tends to be at least the character of this war. And also, defense is often anchored around population centers, around cities. They serve as a key part of defense, right? So once the fight actually becomes a siege of a population center, you then get into the situation where it’s very hard to withdraw, and you’ll see Russians expend an immense amount of troops and personnel to try to take it, destroy the city in the process.
Michael Kofman
But Ukraine also bitterly hold on to the city in an effort to try to exhaust the Russian offensive there.
Lex Fridman
Before we return to Prigozhin, and Wagner, and Prigozhin’s mutiny, Preston, what do you think about this maybe even in the modern context, over-fixation on particular symbolic regions or territories or cities versus the territorial gains in the broader context of the war?
Preston Stewart
It’s difficult, and I think it’s case by case because as Mike mentioned, sometimes it gets this added value just because it’s held for a period of time, and it was hard to take for a month, and then two months, and then three months. Then all of a sudden it’s this fortress city when maybe it shouldn’t be that. But both sides, and that’s exactly what we saw with Bakhmut, where it was on both sides, and you saw Russia was very hyper-focused on taking the town-
Preston Stewart
… to where they had to. And if they weren’t going to in a period of time, it was gonna be a failure. And we started to see them claim ownership of the… pretty early on, and they were maybe exaggerating their advances, but it showed just how important that was to Moscow. It made the same importance then inside of Ukraine. So beforehand, I don’t think anybody would’ve expected that. Now, as Mike mentioned, looking back, there’s some debate around it. But I think it’s the kind of thing that just happens upon a country, happens upon a military. And there was a lot of criticism on some Ukrainian military leaders at the time, and we’ve seen that in a couple other areas as well, the Kursk offensive. Avdiivka, I believe there was some debate around that as well.
Preston Stewart
Right now, I think we’re gonna start seeing more around Kostiantynivka. It’s an area that it’s starting to look like some of these other areas that got encircled, and it’s a big ask of the military leadership to be able to recognize that. Nobody wants to withdraw from that area, especially in Ukraine’s position. They would be giving up terrain that is their country to the advancing Russian army. But at some point, it’s no longer worth holding on, and you’re risking the troops that are forward. It’s a very difficult decision to make, and I think it’s more emotional than we can recognize from the outside.
Michael Kofman
Yeah. And that point is a judgment call. When are you no longer exhausting your opponent with a very favorable attrition ratio in an urban fight ’cause you’re on the defense, and they’re on the offense, and they’re likely to take more casualties, versus when are you facing potential encirclement? There’s a threat to your force. The lines of communication are being interdicted, so you’re losing personnel and equipment trying to sustain your positions. And then lastly, usually when you can really see it, is when you’re forced to counterattack in order to maintain your positions because now you’re taking casualties because you’re the one going on the offensive in order to try to even maintain the position. And we’ve seen that time and time again in a number of fights.
Michael Kofman
In some cases, justifiable, in other cases, you can see it may be politically motivated. At the end of the day, military strategy flows from decisions of political leaders. Political decision-making holds supremacy, and they decide what is a critical objective and which battle to them is essential in the war. Even if analysts or somebody else or planners looking at it might say, “This is not a critical fight,” that doesn’t matter. When political leaders decide that it’s a critical fight, and then when they raise political stakes and say that they’re gonna try to hold on to the city, now it becomes important.
War optimism and bad information
Lex Fridman
Can you speak to what does it take in the modern context to gain control of a territory or to, quote unquote, “take a territory”? There’s something that I’ve heard both of you speak about, which is that on the Russian side, the Russian military claims more territory than they have actually taken- … and that the difference between how much territory is actually taken and the claimed taken territory has an effect on the actual operation of the military. Can you just speak to what it takes to gain control of a territory?
Preston Stewart
I think that’s up for debate, and we see Russian analysts getting frustrated and debating this day in and day out because it kind of happens in phases. If you look at just a town in Ukraine, there’s a period of time where it’s normal, and there’s a population there, and the businesses are open. But then as the front gets closer, you start to see the population leave, and the businesses close, and the next thing you know, it’s just military. And then at some point, there’s no military because it’s in the gray zone, and you’ve got Russians in one side, Ukrainians on the other. What Russia has done a lot this… I feel like it’s increased, is they will have one soldier forward. They’ll wave a flag for a drone to pick up.
Preston Stewart
They will mark that on a map and then say, “Everything from their back we now control.”
Lex Fridman
So like a video of that soldier with that flag in that area.
Preston Stewart
Usually a video. This last week, we saw some AI being utilized where it was a, a-
Lex Fridman
Like a fake video.
Preston Stewart
Yeah. It was a fake video called out by the Russians themselves saying, “Guys, what are we doing here? This is not good.” But-
Lex Fridman
Wow.
Preston Stewart
… even if it is a real soldier, that’s the PR victory of saying, “Look how far we’ve advanced. We now control this territory.” The Russian pushback there is one soldier in a basement is not control of territory. Now, is it a platoon of soldiers? Is it a regiment pushing forward beyond that town? That’s up for debate because even if you have a large number of troops in that village, if you can’t resupply them or if Ukraine has drone dominance in that entire area, and you can’t get anyone in or out, you know, what are we talking about control of the village?
Preston Stewart
You don’t really have it. So it’s tricky in that sense, and I think if you’re talking about full-blown control, as in you can move, you can come and go from that town as see fit, you’re probably talking about 20-plus kilometers back from the front line. And even then, you’re still at risk of getting hit every single day by drones. But these forward areas, it’s been interesting, man. Russia has … A concern that I have is we’re starting to see Putin more and more reference some of these claims that are not in line with reality, and I really wonder where up that chain of command they understand that they are sending a false report. The AI video is a great example. Somebody made that.
Preston Stewart
So where up that chain does somebody know this is not an accurate report and we’re not there, and they send it anyways? Or is it going all the way up, and everybody genuinely believes that to be true? Because it’s, it paints a very different picture of how the war is playing out.
Michael Kofman
I think on the Russian maps, they consistently claim themselves to be something like 15 kilometers, 10 kilometers at least forward of where they actually are, and they regularly cite positions they had from soldiers that they might have in place somewhere that infiltrated, but they don’t have them anymore. They’ve been lost. Or as Preston says, they took pictures of some flags. And it actually very negatively shapes Russian operations. In some ways, we are fortunate that they have such a culture of falsification of battlefield data because they then organize fire support around lines and positions they don’t actually hold.
Michael Kofman
Their troops will often advance, or units that rotate into an area will be given the wrong information, and what they think are actually their forward line of troops is contested territory, right? So they’ll end up having their own soldiers killed because the map they were given is not correct. I think Preston’s also very right that it’s clear this information trickles up to political decision-making and to Putin, and that that may be part of the reason why he holds the view that Russian forces are still advancing in the Donbas. Because in fact, the maps being supplied lie in a very literal sense.
Michael Kofman
And also, believe it or not, there is a pattern to Russian offensive operations where often we see them really intensify offensive efforts right now during this time period from October to November. And their casualties go up, and it is often because they find themselves pressed to actually take the territory that they’ve been claiming to control- … in reports for months.
Preston Stewart
Right. Right.
Michael Kofman
Because now they’re at a point where senior commanders are basically saying, “Now show it to me,” and they don’t actually control this terrain, and now they have to really throw men at it to try to realize the lie that they’ve been telling for some time. And I completely agree what Preston said. We have a very hard time mapping it. It is a gray zone for some substantial distance, and to me, probably the best way to describe control is you’re able to use terrain for your purposes. That is, not only do you … Have you deny it to your enemy, not only do you have presence there, but you are able to largely use this terrain, and the enemy does not have substantial amount of fire control over it.
Michael Kofman
Because at this stage of the war, yes, you can go 15, 10 kilometers from the front line. Those are technically your positions, but you can’t freely move around on them. You can’t do much of what a ground force would expect to do. You have presence, but you don’t really have control. You’re not able to use it for your own purposes. And many places, Ukrainian-Russian positions in cities, or sometimes in tree lines, are so commingled that they’re marbled. And it’s very hard to map control at all because if there’s hundreds of Russian troops in Kostiantynivka in basements commingled with hundreds of Ukrainian troops in basements, who controls Kostiantynivka? How would you know that? How would you empirically judge it?
Preston Stewart
It’s crazy when you really think about it, Lex. Like, I could color a map on the screen, and nothing matters. Doesn’t really change anything. The fact that leaders are making those changes and then sending their troops forward with bad information is crazy. It’s costing lives. Like, at the very least, you know, when they say there was Kupiansk a little over a year ago, Russia claimed ownership of it. This was one that Putin said that they had control over. He famously invited international journalists. He said, “Go in and check it out for yourselves,” and they didn’t. And what that did then was you could see Russian forces were able to relocate assets to other areas.
Preston Stewart
Air power and fire support that might be needed in certain areas was either pushed forward or pulled back because it wasn’t needed there anymore. So you’ve got these soldiers out there that now supposedly are 10 kilometers forward. They can’t get airstrikes on the Ukrainian positions because if they call that up, somebody is gonna have to say, “Yeah, okay, the lines have changed a little bit.” So they’re genuinely making these changes, making these false reports, and it is … It’s hard to fully understand, hard to grasp. It’s costing lives.
Michael Kofman
If you want an anecdote, I was just west of Kupiansk at that time last year when Gerasimov declared to Putin in the meeting that they had all the Ukrainian units in Kupiansk encircled. But I was there with a colleague from one of the Ukrainian brigades, basically reading this news, and it’s remarkable. I mean, when you’re actually right by there and you see the situation, these things don’t pass the giggle test, but nonetheless, this is what you see Russian senior military leadership tell their political leadership.
Lex Fridman
To me, this is fascinating because maybe you can educate me on this, but my guess would be throughout human history, throughout all the wars, whether you look at Napoleon, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, maybe even Genghis Khan, although the interesting dynamic there, there’s always going to be some distortion of information as it travels up the chain of command. And you can study where the distortion is greatest depending on the culture. Who… Is it a soldier lying to their commander? Is it the general lying to the commander-in-chief? There’s some distortion happening somewhere. So maybe can you speak to the distortions happening on both sides here?
Preston Stewart
From what I can see, Ukraine is getting a much better picture of the current status along the front. Very hard to say where, and on both sides, very hard to say if and where there’s a breakdown, and you’re absolutely right. Commanders want to say that they’re doing a good job. It takes a lot of integrity to say, “We lost positions.” And we’ve seen that in the Ukrainian military- … where commanders have been relieved because they’ve not reported that up correctly. It seems to be much more of a culture issue in the Russian military, top to bottom. But yeah, it’s definitely happening on both sides. Definitely, definitely happening to a degree. Hard to tell where that line is.
Lex Fridman
I think it’s worse on the Russian side. It’s because of the military culture. First, there is a real lack of trust in the Russian military between soldiers and their commanders, and that breeds a lack of cohesion. Second, the military runs on a very coercive culture, so you expect that for any mistake, you’re going to be punished, right? And so there’s a strong incentive to lie. And then lastly, there is a centralization of command and control, where rather than the junior officer who’s actually at the position commanding the troops who has greater authority, it’s the senior officer who has greater authority. Because they decide everything, and then they kind of give the scheme of maneuver the orders for junior folks to execute.
Lex Fridman
And for the Russian military, the effects are worse because the way they plan military decision-making can often lead to, you know, what in data is called a garbage in, garbage out problem, where if the information on what’s happening at the tactical level is in, is not correct, it’s false, and the planning is based on that, and people are executing combat tasks on the basis of things that aren’t true, then it’s very problematic for that military, especially because they don’t have the same culture of having freedom to adjust, adapt, make decisions at a more junior level on the ground, right? They’re waiting for information to reach the senior commander.
Lex Fridman
I don’t wanna make it sound this kind of ridiculously regimented, but nonetheless, it’s a bigger problem for the Russian military, as we see consistently. Even though the Ukraine Armed Forces have also had issues with falsification of information and commanders, planning commanders getting relieved, especially under the previous commander-in-chief, Syrskyi. And sometimes also because they were placed in an untenable position, because they wouldn’t have enough men. They had to defend the position. They too were told that they can’t withdraw a position without approval from the general staff. And if they lost the position, they reported it, they would be told they had to take it back, but they didn’t have the forces to take it back.
Lex Fridman
And then a commander is sometimes faced with an ethical dilemma. Do I sacrifice men to take a position that I know is untenable or I can’t take back? Or do I face the consequences of failing to report it, but I preserve my own men? What do I do? These are not the easiest choices, you know? It’s not clean cut.
Preston Stewart
It seems from my just observational history, there seems to be a, especially, like, at the general level, a kind of optimism that there’s a path towards winning this war at a strategic level soon. It seems like United States and other nations have been engaged in, you know, in case of Afghanistan and Iraq is like something like forever wars. How does that… At which level of distortion of information do you keep going with this kind of momentum of a war going on for a prolonged period of time without any strategic victory? Or is that not attributable to distortion of information and something else?
Lex Fridman
Oh, I think Afghanistan’s a very interesting case study- … of how we ended up for 20 years in that war. I would… Preston, I think you should talk a bit about that since you were in that fight. But-
Preston Stewart
Well, there’s a pride aspect to it of can you get it done? Yes, I can. And it’s not necessarily overstating what you’re able to do, but understanding you, there are constraints on your resources and what you have available to accomplish the mission, and nobody wants to be the one to say, “I can’t do that.”
Preston Stewart
And there’s yeah, there’s just some pride in finding a way to make it work, and I think a lot of that comes down to bad advice at some level of setting those conditions. They, you should not be put in that position if you cannot accomplish the task. Afghanistan, great example would be we were, we had combat units flooded across the entirety of the country. Great for security, not necessarily great for nation building, not necessarily great for developing, changing a culture, if that was even possible in Afghanistan, to get the people out in Zhari District in Kandahar Province to understand that the person in Kabul that doesn’t speak their language and they’ve never seen before represents them. That’s not, that’s not a soldier’s job. We don’t know how to do that.
Preston Stewart
We’re not very good at it. But we don’t want to say we can’t, so we say, “We got it. We can figure it out. We’ll learn counterinsurgency operations. We will send people to language courses,” when in reality, somewhere along the line, somebody should have said, “You know what? This isn’t what we can do.” We need State Department. We need USAID. We need XYZ to be able to step in and fill this. It’s, I think it’s a military mindset, and I don’t think that’s unique to the United States. I imagine most countries, the higher you get up the ranks, the generals are very much, “We got this.”
Michael Kofman
I wanna add to Preston’s great perspective, the point of view from the other side, having had a bit of experience dealing with political leadership. Sometimes the information that the military’s passing up is overly optimistic. It’s, you know, this mindset of, “I don’t wanna say it can’t get done.” But there are also definitely times where the political leadership has clear assumptions and is very resistant to information that is adverse to those assumptions. First, one of the basic inputs into wars when leaders think they are going to go to war is war optimism. They have a clear set of assumptions. Often it’s that the war will be sharp and short, that it’ll be a quick war. Good example, Russian full-scale invasion in 2022 or our war with Iran this year.
Michael Kofman
They are resistant to information that actually it’s quite risky, what will happen if it becomes a prolonged war. When military leaders tell them that it might be this, it might be that, they need all these forces, they face the problem that if they basically tell them, “This can’t be done,” the political leader will tell them, “No, you’re just the wrong person for the job. I’ll find somebody who will tell me they can do it. You think you need 300,000 troops for Iraq? I’ll find someone who will do it for a lot less,” okay? And lastly, there are often cases also, let’s say you have a prolonged conventional war like Afghanistan, and political leadership might ask not what do you need to win the war. It’s not clear that victory defined in their terms is necessarily possible.
Michael Kofman
They’ll ask, “Really, what is the amount of troops you need for me to kick this can down the road so that we don’t lose the war on my watch, and then it goes to the next election and then maybe becomes somebody else’s problem?” Okay? So there are many times where I’ve seen that it’s not the military leadership that’s to blame, it’s that the political leadership, which at the end of the day makes key decisions on the war, sets constraints on the military of how they can fight, what forces they have available to fight, have certain assumptions, have certain ideas, and they’re not necessarily amenable to military advice. Where they take– They’re listening to the military advice, but they’re also considering domestic politics, they’re considering international politics.
Michael Kofman
There’s other things that predominate in their calculus other than strict kind of operational planning or military analysis. And I think that’s important to consider because wars at the end of the day are started by political leaders. They’re the ones who decide to go to war, and they have very strong views and assumptions, and some extent also emotions and fears that play into that.
Lex Fridman
How often is it that military leadership, like the generals, try to say, “Don’t do this”? In terms of starting wars, this is– this comes to a bigger theme is I would love to see a long distance future of human civilization that doesn’t have wars. And it seems like we start wars, we broadly, humanity. And I would love to know which are the humans amongst us that can stop them from starting.
Michael Kofman
I think there are plenty of times where military leaders give the advice that a war could be a risky or a costly misadventure. They don’t necessarily say, “Don’t do this,” but the advice they give and they lay out, right, has clear implications to it. And there are plenty of times where military leaders or not military leaders, let’s say civilian leaders, in our case what was the Department of Defense, will advise against a war, right? Yes, there are plenty of times where they don’t give that advice. But I’d be open to Preston’s views on this, but if there’s some public sense of the military profession as folks that are actually eager to go to a war, that’s often not the case, and that’s not been my experience.
Michael Kofman
People who have commanded other folks in combat and who have lost lives and who understand the implications of that endeavor are very rarely eager to pursue it, right? Especially if they’re not sure that the cause is right or that it’s been well thought through or that the strategy makes sense or that this is very much a necessary war. So that’s not been my impression.
Preston Stewart
One of the challenges there, Lex, is it’s not, at least the way we operate in the United States, it’s not the military’s job to make the decision to go to war or not. It’s their job to advise on what the possi- what the capabilities are, what the options are for the president to eventu- the commander in chief to eventually make that decision. So I think we have to be careful with that, that bleeding into… This– War is a political endeavor.
Preston Stewart
So when the military starts advising on we should or we shouldn’t go to war, I think that’s a very slippery slope. They can say, “This will or will not accomplish our objectives. You know, if we drop a couple bombs, it might not get us to the point where we actually can say that we got what we wanted out of this.” But broadly speaking, yes or no to war, I think is probably not best reserved for the military.
Michael Kofman
Absolutely. War is a sociopolitical phenomenon, and it is political leadership that has to not just make these decisions, but holds the supremacy in making them and the accountability for it. And in our system, specifically in the United States, the senior-most military officer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, does not command forces. They are the top advisor on military affairs to the president. Actually quite different than other systems where you might have commander in chief or someone else that actually c- directly c– For example, in the case of Ukraine’s or the Russian military, where you have a chief of general staff or a commander in chief that’s a military position that actually can directly command forces.
Prigozhin’s mutiny
Lex Fridman
Speaking of structure and the hierarchy of the different organizations in the military, getting back to Prigozhin.
Michael Kofman
Yes. Yes. Love this. Forgot about him.
Lex Fridman
We talked about 17 hours ago. So what happened there? You talked about the Wagner Group and Bakhmut. What was with the mutiny? What does it represent? What does it show about the Russian military?
Michael Kofman
Okay, so Prigozhin had this ongoing conflict with Gerasimov and Shoigu. Why? He was basically positioning Wagner as this more successful alternative, okay? And I think he was allowed to position Wagner in this way, and I think there were elites in Russia who were backing him as well. So in some extent you had an internal battle between different elite clans, one associated with the Ministry of Defense, the military, another one backing Prigozhin. And Prigozhin was given this leeway. He would be constantly complaining that he wasn’t being given enough artillery ammo and so on and so forth. Even actually his effort was a priority effort, and he was given a lot of artillery ammo to sustain it.
Michael Kofman
And he was also building out this kind of popular following and to some extent trying to see if he could expand his political cachet. Ultimately, that competition between him and the military, which played out at the leadership level, thus he actively attacked the Ministry of Defense and the Chief of General Staff. But also Wagner forces looked down on the regular Russian military, seeing them as incompetent, ineffective, and the regular Russian military looked down on Wagner forces, seeing them as either hired mercenaries or convicts, right? So there was this, these clashes between them.
Michael Kofman
And they competed with each other during the Battle of Bakhmut, because even in the fight for Soledar and later in the Battle of Bakhmut Wagner and the Airborne competed for who would take credit, right? And later on in the battles, we got to April, May, Prigozhin started saying the regular military has pulled artillery and fire support from him because they don’t want Wagner to win. They want Wagner to lose more personnel, and then they want to come in at the end and take the credit. He basically advanced this conspiracy theory.
Michael Kofman
But the mutiny really kicks off because at a certain point, the Russian Ministry of Defense has had it, and Shoigu essentially, clearly a much more powerful player at the end of the day, has an ultimatum issued that after the Battle of Bakhmut is decided, that all Wagner personnel have to sign contracts with the military, right? For a long time, Wagner was essentially an autonomous force supported by the Russian military and generally integrated into an operational command, right? And logistically all supported by the regular Russian armed forces. But with a huge amount of autonomy, where Prigozhin was essentially running his own army and his own fight in coordination with the Russian Airborne. And Shoigu’s ultimatum trapped Prigozhin, essentially, and it put them in this position.
Michael Kofman
Wagner had withdrawn from Bakhmut and was replenishing personnel and was essentially in rest in Luhansk. And Prigozhin sensed that he was trapped, that either Shoigu was going to force the complete surrender of Wagner’s autonomy, and he would lose control, command and control of his personnel, or he had to go on this reckless adventure. And I think he may have conceived of this not as any attempt at regime change, but some analysts that I know saw the mutiny as essentially a petition. He then tries to advance on Rostov in Russia, which is where the headquarters of the Russian military effort for the war is. Wagner, if you remember those scenes, the footage, actually encircles and occupies the headquarters. There’s a standoff.
Lex Fridman
I mean, it does look from the outside as an attempt to take over power.
Michael Kofman
Well, absolutely. It is a mutiny. It is a mutiny in the midst of a war, and he wants Shoigu and Gerasimov. He’s essentially stuck though because they are not in the Rostov headquarters, and Putin comes out very vocally seeing this and declaring this as a betrayal in the midst of a war.
Michael Kofman
And a whole set of Wagner columns, there are two Wagner columns that are advancing past Rostov down the road towards Moscow. And by the way, at the same time, they’re shooting down Russian helicopters. They’re shooting down Russian planes. Actually, Wagner’s mutiny is quite damaging for the Russian Air Force. It kills a lot, quite a few personnel. And they’re advancing towards Moscow. There’s some degree of panic because elites in Moscow themselves are not sure, ’cause all the Russian forces are deployed in around Ukraine, and they’re not prepared to face these Wagner troops who are actually fairly experienced. And I want to be clear, they have tanks. They have air defense with them. They have armored fighting vehicles. They brought a lot of equipment with them to the fight.
Michael Kofman
They’re this… I want to be clear, they’re not advancing in trucks and pickups. This is actually a mechanized formation.
Lex Fridman
So how close did that come to overthrowing power in Moscow?
Michael Kofman
Oh, I don’t think very close. I don’t think that they had any chance of doing it, and Moscow’s a massive city, so if they’d gotten in there, I don’t know what they could have hoped to achieve.
Lex Fridman
Was there some degree to which that was the goal?
Michael Kofman
Look, I think what the goal was, once they got to Rostov and had no chance of either getting their hands on Shoigu and Gerasimov, and Putin had essentially ruled against them, their only leverage was to advance on Moscow. They used the advance on Moscow, Prigozhin used it, to then negotiate a stand down and amnesty and then a handover of assets and control of Wagner operations over time. That’s what happened. He used that as bargaining leverage. I think he also early on saw that he did not have support from the Russian elite. The Russian elite did not see him as an alternative to Putin, so there’s no chance of success in regime change. And the reason for that is straightforward. In personalist authoritarian regimes- The first thing they do is eliminate alternatives.
Michael Kofman
And most coups you never even hear of, they fail. They never take off the ground. This is even a rare case of a real mutiny that becomes this phenomenal 24-hour event. Most attempts at coups in personal authoritarian regimes are stopped by intelligence. They never take off the ground. Because typically the number of elites and people you have to involve in organizing a coup makes it very difficult to keep it secret. So if that authoritarian system is at all effective, it’s going to discover it. But that’s what I think ultimately happened. And of course lastly I remember having these discussions at the time, folks thought that Prigozhin somehow got off easy because he negotiated a hand off or a sell off of his assets. He was still alive after the coup.
Michael Kofman
But it was clear to those of us who followed Russia that there was no way he was going to survive this.
Preston Stewart
Speaking of which, going to Perplexity, Yevgeny Prigozhin died on August 23rd, 2023, aged 62, when his private jet crashed in Russia’s Tver region while flying from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Do you think he was killed?
Michael Kofman
It exploded in midair. It was very obvious that he was killed, and he wasn’t killed alone. He was killed along with several senior commanders of Wagner. And to me, the only explanation is this plane exploded in midair on video. It was clear that he was never going to survive this mutiny. And that very likely top folks involved in Wagner weren’t going to survive it either, and he was killed very demonstratively as a demonstration to others. And so that outcome to me, and many other folks who had watched Russia for years, was not surprising.
Preston Stewart
This is a fascinating chapter in the war, Lex. I mean, there was a period of time there, that 48, 72 hours, where it was unknown, like what was gonna happen. There was a real consideration that this might be the end of the war. A funny aspect here is Prigozhin was one of his many companies, very wealthy, ran the Internet Research Agency, which is kind of the bot farms in Russia, and Prigozhin and Wagner was so popular at the time. But as Mike was talking about, one of the issues here was they were the ones being celebrated. If you go back to this time period around Bakhmut, the biggest, most significant battle of the war likely to date-
Preston Stewart
… nobody can tell you the other Russian units that were operating anywhere else. But people know Wagner. They know that name. They’ve probably seen pictures of Prigozhin. He was becoming famous. So when this march happened, you had these bots. They didn’t know which direction to go. Are they still on team Wagner because Prigozhin’s their guy and he’s capturing all of these cities? Or wait a minute, is he against Putin now? Should we sit this one out?
Preston Stewart
And another interesting aspect here is this, in my opinion, was something that Russia was doing very well, and it almost worked out too well, and they didn’t know how to kind of direct it in the right way. Wagner was a private military company, a private military group, kind of. They were not really a part of the Russian government, and this gave them this weird autonomy to operate in places like Syria. I mean, they went head-to-head. Wagner forces went head-to-head with the US forces in Syria.
Michael Kofman
It went very badly for them.
Preston Stewart
Did not go well for Russia.
Michael Kofman
It was, I think it was 2018. Might have been February 2018 outside of Deir ez-Zor.
Preston Stewart
Yeah. But it gave Russia this ability to have deniability. Say, “This is a private company. This isn’t our military.” But they effectively operate. I mean, they would fly in on Ministry of Defense aircraft. They would train in Ministry of Defense locations, and it was, all things considered, a pretty effective mechanism of state power that Russia had put together. They were pretty innovative in the war. The concept of pulling these convicts in, which I just interviewed a soldier that fought in Bakhmut, talked to him a couple weeks ago, and he talked about how exhausting it was that these guys just kept coming. He said one after the other, after the other. You couldn’t stop. They were innovative in that sense, but Wagner wasn’t just prisoners. They had very lethal-
Preston Stewart
… well-trained assault groups that were kind of leading the way in some of these new tactics because in a sense it was like this, again, privatized army. Prigozhin was competing to try to make them better, and I don’t know the different directions that could have gone, whether they branch out or became a kind of elite assault force type thing, but they became too popular. And Shoigu and Gerasimov didn’t really know. It seems like there was a bit of a panic, and just shut it all down, and now it doesn’t exist. They did. There’s uh, the Africa Corps-
Preston Stewart
… is operating in Africa. It’s got some of the old Wagner leadership, but they effectively did away with all of that private military stuff, and said, “We gotta bring this all in-house. We can’t do that again.” But again, the interesting piece there is I do think Wagner was onto something. They were operating brutal, to be clear. Incredibly brutal organization. I mean, there was an awful video of one of their guys, I believe surrendered, and they got ahold of him, or he wouldn’t go on an assault or something. They smashed his head with a hammer against a cinder block, their own guy. So that’s the group we’re talking about, to be clear. But they were effective, and Russia destroyed the organization.
Michael Kofman
There’s an effect that Wagner did have, and like referred to as the Wagnerization of the Russian military, which is what happens after Wagner is dismantled. The Russian military widely adopts Wagner tactics. It begins to contract convicts in very large numbers. It creates assault companies called Shtorm-Z and Shtorm-V. It begins to deploy assault companies of convicts structured as assault groups across the battalions and regular formations. It basically takes much of what made Wagner successful and begins to spread this across the Russian military. And then the Russian military begins to actually fight, having seen how Wagner fought, primarily with assault groups and assault detachments, using them as a constantly replenishable assault force that they throw at the Ukrainian forces.
Michael Kofman
And for a period of time, believe it or not, in ’23 and ’24, many of these assault units are convict staffed, and many others are not convict staffed, but people take special contracts that pay more, essentially taking on the risk of being an assault group. And so the Russian Ministry of Defense and the military actually begins to copy and imitate a lot of Wagner tactics. The Russian airborne also builds out assault groups and assault detachments. And following this for years, do you see the Russian military actually fighting primarily with these assault formations? And over time now, you have fewer and fewer convict staff groups, but nonetheless, thousands upon thousands of convicts were used by the Russian armed forces in assault units after Wagner.
Michael Kofman
Prigozhin said that he lost, killed, killed in action 20,000 people in just the Battle of Bakhmut, which lasts somewhere, I think, from August 2022 to May of ’23. But the Russian military lost far more over the course of the years in terms of convicts they used. So I just want to put this postscript that Wagner as an organization may have died, but it in some ways infected the Russian military, and these tactics spread across the Russian armed forces, which both led to some success, but also led the Russian military to overspecialize in using assault groups, which eventually led to diminishing returns. They specialized in small-scale combat action, and over time struggled to recover the ability to conduct larger-scale, more complex operations by focusing on fighting this way.
Lex Fridman
I should mention for the listeners, for the audience, that it is now past midnight, which is the only time we could do it. So there’s two people in front of me. They’re real warriors and just powering through. I really appreciate it, but quick bathroom break.
Putin vs Zelenskyy
Lex Fridman
All right, we’re back, trying to power through. This might be a good moment to ask about the very top, the leadership, the two commanders in chief Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. What are, from a military perspective, the strengths and weaknesses of the two in terms of their role as commander in chief of their respective militaries?
Preston Stewart
In my opinion, it appears as though Zelenskyy has offloaded a lot of the military responsibilities to the military, and he’s not making tactical or operational level decisions. Generally speaking, that’s a good thing. I don’t think that that is happening in Russia. It’s harder to say based off of how Putin is reporting at times. It seems like he might be a little bit more involved than Zelenskyy. But I get the impression that he’s pretty removed from the military decision-making process, which is generally what you want to see. Historically, the more that a leader gets directly involved in that type of stuff, the messier it becomes in either direction. In terms of the negatives, I would say, well, they both have very different dynamics at play.
Preston Stewart
Zelenskyy is constantly appealing to an international audience, trying to solicit support from around the world. That’s not really something that Putin has to do. So Putin much more focused on, I’d say, domestic and then kind of presenting a strong picture to the world that they’re not on the verge of collapse, they’re not on the verge of falling back anytime soon.
Lex Fridman
Is Putin the same? Does he have any direct input into the military operation at the strategic operation or tactical level, as you understand?
Preston Stewart
At strategic, I’m sure. It does not look like from what I’ve seen that he has much input at the tactical or operational level, but I’d be interested in Mike’s thoughts there as well.
Michael Kofman
I think there was a period early on in 2022 when things were going very badly for the Russian military that he was actually contacting commanders, which are still very command, senior commanders at the level of the grouping of troops, which is more the operational level formation above that of the combined arms army. But neither leader, in my view, really micromanages the fight. I think Zelenskyy is getting a much fairer and more honest picture of the situation, has a much better assessment of Ukraine’s position and how Ukraine can best align its resources, can best advocate for resources with allies, and has more realistic goals, more importantly, more realistic goals for the military.
Michael Kofman
If you look at Putin, Russian political goals, to me, not only seem difficult to achieve, but for a long time I had argued that Russia has a fundamental mismatch in this war between its political goals and the military means available. And the fault of that lies squarely with Vladimir Putin because he started the war, and it’s the job of political leadership to see, and certainly if you can’t see it four years in or five years in, should be asking hard questions of yourself.
Lex Fridman
Can you speak to that mismatch?
Michael Kofman
You can periodize this war a number of ways, and I’ve done so in my own writing. You can look at different operations, offenses, whatnot, or you can periodize it one big way, which is to say that you essentially have the first 30 days, this attempt at a coup d’état that fails, the Russian attempt to take over Ukraine, to replace Ukraine’s government with one imposed by Russia. And this is really the contest for whether Ukraine will remain an independent state with its own national identity. And this invasion fails, this attempt fails decisively, and it cannot be recreated in the context of this war. And then everything else that follows, you know, and this I’m talking about from February 24th to March 25th.
Michael Kofman
Then everything else that follows is a war, you know, that is a difficult, a tragic, prolonged conventional war defined by attrition, defined by exhaustion. And this war will define potentially the borders of the independent Ukrainian state. What will be the, you know, the economy, to what extent the state will be economically sustainable, and whether or not Ukraine will ultimately have to make any concessions in terms of its strategic orientation, what organizations it can join or not join, like NATO or the European Union. But it’s not a war to decide whether or not Ukraine will be independent or whether or not Ukraine will have its own national identity. That’s, that’s already clear. That was the first 30 days.
Michael Kofman
And so to me, the war is in part Russia’s attempt to impose its will on Ukraine, but it’s become eminently clear for some time that Russia does not have the military means to achieve Putin’s more maximalist objectives in this conflict. And if anything, in the past year, even if you don’t agree with this assessment for the early years of this war, in the past year it’s become eminently clear that Russia’s not coming closer to its goals. In fact, its military performance is getting worse, and that’s been going on for some time. I would say the inflection point in this war for Russia, certainly on the tactical level, was back in summer, fall of twenty twenty-five.
Michael Kofman
And so you can see that Ukraine had actually narrowed its position in negotiations fairly closely to its combat performance. Ukraine’s political demands are ceasefire along the line of control, repatriation of lost people and stolen children. But it’s not these outsized demands that Russian political leadership is making. You see Russian demands as not being tied to Russian military performance. They seem much more tied to aspirational performance that Russia wish it had in this war but actually doesn’t. That’s why they want Ukraine to concede the rest of Donbas, because they’re not able to take it, and they’re not on a path to taking it anytime soon.
Michael Kofman
So even if we assess this war for most minimalist territorial war aims of Russia prioritizing the occupation of the rest of the Donbas, the last remaining some twenty plus percent, we have no way to even predict if they are able to take it in this war given how poorly the Russian military is performing right now. And so here I am kind of making a judgment, because if you see a country prosecuting a war with a clear mismatch between military means available and the political goals of the war, and the leader of that country unwilling to revise down the political aims, willing to pay a cost that would be ruinous for Russia. I mean, this war will be seen as a strategic failure for Russia with generational knock-on effects. Whatever Russia takes will not be worth the cost.
Michael Kofman
That’s very clear at this point. It’s very difficult to see how Vladimir Putin goes down in history from this war other than, you know, in ignominy. And then even this many years into it, you now clearly see that Russia is not attaining its military objectives on any reasonable timelines. It’s not revising the negotiating position, and there’s not been a dramatic shift in how Russia’s forces are fighting the war either.
Lex Fridman
Can you linger on what Vladimir Putin’s maximalist objectives might be? Which territory is included in those maximalist objectives? Donbas?
Michael Kofman
Absolutely, Donbas. As much of Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk as they could potentially occupy, because you don’t see Russian forces advancing in Donbas. You see them advancing on a broad twelve hundred kilometer front. Donbas may be the priority effort, but there’s ongoing offensive operations by Russian troops. For a long time, they were taking territory where they could, and so they were actually advancing more in Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk last year because it was easier to advance there. Less urban terrain, fewer of the Ukrainian army’s better troops there since the rest were focused on defending the Donbas. And also obviously seeking national concessions, right?
Michael Kofman
Limits on the size of Ukrainian armed forces, limits on what kind of capabilities Ukraine can have, limits on Ukraine’s strategic orientation or ability to join NATO, limits on whether or not Western forces can ever be deployed or based in Ukraine. Other national concessions dealing with the status of Russian language, maybe the status of the Russian Orthodox Church, and so on and so forth. Those are still there, you know, amongst Russian demands negotiations, and also seeking recognition, to what extent they can get recognition for territory that they occupied and annexed. So the reason I say all this is, I think it is a fair criticism. I don’t know how Preston sees this matter.
Michael Kofman
I think that Ukrainian goals in this war are not only far more reasonable, but well-constructed and at least tied to what the military can achieve. There’s an observable strategy that integrates military operations, stabilizing the front line and liberating territory, trying to protect critical infrastructure, air and missile defense, to reduce the impact of Russia’s strike campaign, and prevent the Russian leadership from thinking that they have the ability to somehow bomb Ukraine into conceding these demands. And the third one is exhausting the Russian effort by striking the key components of the Russian economy: energy export, refining capacity, other targets.
Michael Kofman
Now more lately we have data centers, but essentially things that are relevant to the functioning of the Russian economy or the Russian government’s ability to raise revenue.
Lex Fridman
So is it fair to say that wars come to an end when both sides, their demands match their military performance?
Michael Kofman
To put it simply, it’s when both sides see that negotiations and a negotiated settlement is a better alternative to fighting than what they can hope to expect to gain on the battlefield.
Preston Stewart
I think that’s a good way of putting it, when military capabilities match what the political concessions are looking like, and I think that’s exactly why a lot of folks are not very optimistic about an end to this war anytime soon, ’cause as Mike mentioned, the demands from Russia are largely unchanged from the beginning of the war. Just this past week, Putin talked about how Zelenskyy did not have the authority to talk about the future of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and Donetsk and Luhansk. He said those are historic Russian lands. So it’s not even up to Zelenskyy to talk about territorial concessions. That’s where Russia’s mindset is, or Putin specifically, where his mindset is in the war, is the territory that they haven’t taken yet isn’t even up for discussion.
Preston Stewart
That’s a foregone conclusion that they will own that. And as Mike mentioned, they are so far from taking that territory right now. I mean, part of that they would have to cross the Dnieper River. There’s no one in the world that looks at this right now and thinks that Russia is anywhere near crossing a water feature to take Kherson City and the rest of that oblast- … let alone the little portions of terrain in Luhansk and Donetsk.
Lex Fridman
So given that if there’s a mismatch between demands and military performance, there’s other factors, forces that come into play, like the state of the economy, the will to fight amongst the people, like very simply manpower, as you’ve spoken about. Like, in order to fight a war, you need humans to be doing that fighting. So how does that come into play? How long can Ukraine last in this fight? How long can Russia last in this fight?
Preston Stewart
Admittedly, the economy, I thought that the sanctions would have done a lot more damage. At this point, I think a lot of people did, and it just hasn’t. Russia has found a lot of ways to bypass that. I thought the Russian people would have been frustrated long ago with the change in their status of living. That didn’t materialize. So there’s no doubt that the Russian economy is feeling some pressure. To the extent that that will impact the end of the war or could drive the end of the war, it’s a bit of a black box from my perspective. The other issue that Russia is playing with right now is manpower. Look, overall, Russia has the manpower advantage, and it’s not close. They have more people than Ukraine, and it’s not close.
Preston Stewart
Ukraine has done a good job of while they are mobilizing and conscripting people into the force, they are doing what they can to minimize soldiers at the front in dangerous positions.
Preston Stewart
They’re handing a lot of this off to robots when possible. Russia is continuing to push men forward, trying to take terrain, not with robots and not with drones, but with soldiers, and that’s costing a lot of lives. Russia in certain regions has started to really struggle in filling their recruitment demands, and we’re seeing what… In fact, I think Mike wrote a piece about this recently, but there’s kind of a shadow mobilization, if you will, inside of Russia, where they’re starting to coerce more and more people into joining the military. Again, they have far more people, but what does it look like when you start having to pull in more people that don’t wanna fight? Ukraine has already had to deal with that.
Preston Stewart
They’ve already had to go through a number of people, a number of different groups within society that maybe didn’t volunteer right out the gate, or I just read an article earlier today about a soldier who now is doing an incredible job in the Ukrainian military. They grabbed him at the border. He was trying to leave the country, and now he’s kind of found a purpose- … as a drone mechanic. Ukraine has done a lot of that. Russia is starting to get into that, and that’s a big unknown, is how will the country react when they start having to tap into other portions of the population? I’m not overly optimistic because we’ve seen a number of things at this point that I thought would’ve pushed the Russian population over the edge. The casualties, for one, shocking.
Preston Stewart
I, at about the three-month mark, I thought that that would be enough for the people in Moscow to rise up and say, “We’re not gonna do this,” and my God, here we are, 30-plus thousand casualties a month, and they’re just… There’s no end in sight. So I’m not optimistic that should there be a mobilization or a push to pull in more people that have not been fighting, that it’ll change anything drastically inside of Russia, but that dynamic is changing.
Michael Kofman
I think from a resource perspective, both of these are fairly large countries, and both of them have considerable external support. Ukraine has demonstrated immense resolve and will to fight, but clear without Western support, Western capital, Western military capabilities, okay, would not have been able to sustain the war for this long.
Michael Kofman
Russia too has benefited significantly from China, Chinese economy, access to machine tools, components to China, to a lesser extent, North Korea, and much lesser extent, Iran, but North Korea ships so much ar- You know, at one point in the war, North Korea was providing 40% of Russian artillery ammunition in this war, and shipping artillery, and actually North Korean troops, if you remember, fought on the Russian side in Kursk during that battle for Kursk. So both sides benefit considerably from external support that… And this is what enables Russia to continue the war. I think from an economic point of view, it’s difficult to predict.
Michael Kofman
It’s clear Russia has the resources to continue to fight into 2027, but key economic elites in Russia early this year in the spring began to publicly state that this war and this level of government spending is not sustainable. Russia’s spending forty-four percent of the government budget on the war, and maybe somewhere around nine to ten percent of GDP. The Russian economy has structural issues, and so much of the money is going towards the military effort and production of military goods, which are not economically valuable that the economy is slowly consuming itself. So they have issues.
Michael Kofman
For Ukraine, the main challenge is that the war continues to damage the Ukrainian economy and also drive people from the country, since a big part of the Russian military campaign is to try to hurt the economic viability of Ukraine and sustainability of life in Ukrainian cities. And so even though Ukraine’s doing well on the battlefield, continuing the war naturally comes a cost. I don’t know any country that hosts a conventional war in its territory that was the better off for it. It’s very clear. And Ukraine’s main challenge is it depends so heavily on financial support, military support, intelligence support from the West as well, that these are things that have to constantly be renewed.
Michael Kofman
And increasingly, you also see that Ukraine is subject to some extent to the mercurial nature or capricious nature of policy of some countries like the United States that– And we should, we should speak frankly about it, right? There’s genuine concern, I think, in Ukraine that folks here want to do business with Russia, and they want to do it no matter the implications for the allies and no matter the implications for Ukraine and for this critical conflict that’s going to shape future security in Europe.
Trump
Lex Fridman
How long can Ukraine last without US support? We should mention that there’s no direct financial aid, as I understand, from the United States, but there is, like you mentioned, intelligence and otherwise actual ammunition and weapons.
Michael Kofman
The reality is the United States still provides considerable military equipment, ammunition, other things Ukraine needs. Just Europeans are paying for it, okay? The United States is also offering quite a bit, again, through foreign military sales. Europeans are paying for that. There’s a fair amount of intelligence support that I can’t speak to, but you should consider it’s probably still important to the effort. So Ukraine may not be dependent nearly on the United States as it was earlier in the war, where we were providing not only a lot of the funding, but artillery ammunition, equipment, what have you. But in key areas, it does still depend on the United States.
Michael Kofman
We’re dependent on the United States certainly not to try to hamper Ukraine’s military effort, where the US still has considerable power and influence.
Lex Fridman
If you can evaluate, what has Trump done as our commander-in-chief in the context of helping bring this war to a resolution?
Preston Stewart
To be blunt, I don’t know that there’s a lot that’s been, from my opinion, that’s been good so far. I think we have ceded our position in the world was looking to us, and I think still will in a lot of ways. Should we take that mantle back up? I think the world is looking to us to take lead, to take point. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re shipping the most equipment or we’re spending the most money, but kind of leading the process and what this will look like going forward. And I think we stepped away from that early in the administration. I get the impression that maybe the president thought this would be easier to resolve than it has been, maybe lost some focus.
Preston Stewart
We’ve lost leverage over Ukraine as well, which is kind of a cold thing to say, but when we were providing weapons to Ukraine, we had the ability to kind of, you know, navigate the peace process with more power, more leverage. We did away with that. That hurt Ukraine, but it also gave us less ability to kind of dictate the direction for things to go. We’ve not seen the sanctions layered on Russia that I think could have been. And unfortunately, I think there’s been just some doubt thrown on the structure of the NATO alliance. Will the alliance hold? And I think there’s probably just enough there for Putin to irrationally but possibly still think that it would be worthwhile to poke and prod to see if there’s an opening there.
Preston Stewart
So personally, I don’t think there’s been a lot of good. I think we’ve kicked the can down the road. I think we’ve seen– We have– we’ve opened the door for Europe to take lead here. In some ways, they’ve started to. There’s still a lot to be done. But I’m not overly optimistic. I think we’ve made some mistakes here in ways that not just difficult for Ukraine, but I think for the United States.
Michael Kofman
The engagement with it has been pretty fitful, Lex. They seem to be coming back to it every three, four months. We’re heavily distracted by the Iran war. And it almost seems that Trump administration had first settled on trying to curse Ukraine, seeing Ukraine as the problem, then began to recognize that Russia was the problem, but doing nothing to compel Russia to change its negotiating position. The meeting in Anchorage, Alaska seemed to begin to bring Russia out of the isolation that we and other Western countries had agreed on, and we can see the knock-on effects of that. And then more recently, we had gone back to trying to compel Ukraine once again. And I just don’t think that the way we’ve engaged this process is the right approach.
Michael Kofman
I agree with Preston. The only thing I might say, ’cause I think there needs to be a balanced view of this, the only positive thing I would say is that even if it was probably for the wrong reasons, prioritizing attaining an end to the war and pushing all the parties involved towards making clear what their requirements are to end the war and some kind of process and essentially an alignment of positions on that topic was helpful. Because the previous administration had no plan. As long as it takes is a slogan, not a plan.
Michael Kofman
If anyone knew what the Biden administration’s plan was to either win the war or end the war, I don’t know. And our European allies, well, they had the opportunity for quite a few years to come up with some kind of plan or negotiating process, and they did not. Their consensus of role was to support Ukraine, that was the common denominator, and to sustain the war. But given that this is a war principally fought in Europe, they too did not take lead on a peace plan for all those years until the Trump administration showed up. And I’m using this as an opportunity, I think for some constructive and hopefully polite criticism, is that of course, ideally, you should have an alignment of positions between the United States and European allies in managing European security. Okay?
Michael Kofman
However, it is not as though the Trump administration came into office and European allies had a plan or vision, and the Trump administration had a worse one or threw that plan and vision out. So then European allies were forced to play catch up and maintain relevance and whatnot. Now, all that being said, I think the Trump administration’s approach overall has not been a good one. They haven’t done a great job consulting the key allies involved in this. They’ve been capricious and in many ways unpredictable in their behavior both towards allies and towards Ukraine. It’s clear that parts of the administration wants to normalize relations and do business with Russia and sees the whole war as kind of an impediment to that.
Michael Kofman
So their motivations, I think objectively to some extent suspect. And the way they’ve engaged with it has been kind of from a let’s make a deal without looking at does this deal make sense, and is this going to be a lasting agreement, or is this just going to be a piece of paper with the word ceasefire on it that won’t, frankly will not be worth the paper it’s on. So there are real issues you can objectively take with the way negotiation’s been handled.
Preston Stewart
One thing I would add there as well is I think it’s important to look at all of this. We’re Americans. It’s important to look at this through the American lens, and it’s not just a matter of were these decisions good or bad for Ukraine, because at the end of the day, we should be thinking about are they good or bad for the United States and our interests. Ukraine has raised their hand a couple times and said, “How can we help?” Especially when it came to the war in Iran and some of these interceptors. There is so much opportunity there in terms of collaboration, joint production, standing up facilities. We don’t have to give money to Ukraine. We don’t have to give equipment to Ukraine.
Preston Stewart
But there is a mutually beneficial relationship to be had there where we can help them produce, and maybe we get some rights for development. Because we need a lot of that stuff too, and I just feel like, again- … I think the best way to put it is we’ve left a lot on the table.
Michael Kofman
And certainly not used our leverage, and have been very, very resistant to using any of it to compel Russia. The approach has been unhelpful and hasn’t really used the power in the world we have. And I think part of the problem was how we started, because when this began, as an effort on Trump administration, for some reason they decided to immediately maneuver the United States out of the leading role of a coalition supporting Ukraine, trying to achieve a favorable outcome in this war, to a neutral party who will now referee and arbitrate the outcome and try to make a deal pretending as though the previous history of how this war began, our whole role in it didn’t happen.
Michael Kofman
Like, and it was a very strange approach to take because it gave up our influence and leverage over both our European allies, who didn’t trust our intentions and could see that we basically were no longer on the same team, and our partner in Ukraine, who immediately began to think that we were about to sell them out because we turned around and abandoned our role, which was critical to supporting them, into one that now placed them on the equal footing with Russia.
Preston Stewart
Which to be clear, Russia even today laughs at the idea that we are trying to be this neutral party. They do not view us that way. They view us as firmly in Ukraine’s camp. Understandably so. So these moves to kind of separate, I understand on paper it may have been, well, now we’re neutral, and we’re not directly aligned with one side or the other that, that didn’t go over in Russia. Didn’t carry.
Paths to peace in Ukraine
Lex Fridman
At this late hour, this is the most challenging question. What are the possible paths to peace in the war in Ukraine? Can you speak to the different trajectories? What are the things you hope to see?
Michael Kofman
I don’t see a willingness on the Russian side right now to negotiate. There are negotiations taking place, and there’s another push, another effort. Maybe some sort of partial compartmentalized ceasefire will be achieved. For example, a ceasefire on energy strikes between the two sides, or a ceasefire halting strikes against shipping in the Black Sea, which have escalated this year. I think that’s possible. I think the problem we have is that the Russian position remains that fighting’s their preferred alternative to negotiation and to a revision of their current demands. And I think from Putin’s perspective, he is likely to wait to see the outcome of two things: the strike campaign over the course of the winter, right, and to see if that places Ukraine in a weaker bargaining position.
Michael Kofman
Because Ukraine right now has considerable leverage. Ukraine’s done much better this year at the front line than Russia, and Russia does not have great prospects for advancing along pretty much any part of the front.
Lex Fridman
Can you explain why that is, and why you’ve already mentioned a couple of times that winter is a very difficult time for Ukraine?
Michael Kofman
The winter is the hardest not for troops at the front line, it’s the hardest for the civilian population. But a country is not just the map or the front. It is the economy, it is the cities, the people. That’s actually what you’re fighting for, right? And so that’s who the winter affects the most. The second thing Putin may be waiting for is the outcome of certain elections in Europe in the spring, like France’s election, to see if the overall situation could be more favorable to Russia. Right now, I don’t see any serious effort other than Ukraine strikes to compel Russia, right? Or to meaningfully exhaust it economically.
Michael Kofman
And so far they have been in factful, but at the end of the day, it’s clear that Russia still has the resources and the will to continue the war into twenty twenty-seven, and so does Ukraine. And Europeans, if they have to, are likely to come up with more funding for Ukraine next year. I think so. And we have not cut off military support, the things we are sending and providing that Ukraine depends on. We have made threats recently, unfortunately, to suspend it, but we haven’t really cut these things off. So even though negotiations continue, as they did last year, that’s why I have a bit of a pessimistic view, and I could be wrong. I hope I’m wrong.
Michael Kofman
Those of us who have been working on this for a long time would like to see it end in the right way, would like to see an acceptable outcome, if not a favorable one to Ukraine. And also, a deal would like to end it in a way that it doesn’t just lead to a third continuation war. This is the pessimistic prospect I want to raise. A lot of folks think of this as, “Let’s just get to a deal. Let’s get to a ceasefire. Why won’t Ukraine, why won’t Russia just agree?” Because ceasefires can often just become rearmament periods to renew hostilities. Ukraine is very vulnerable some months after a ceasefire. Eventually, it’ll have to demobilize all the men at the front line who want to go back to their lives, to their families. Russia’s force is largely contracted.
Michael Kofman
Russia may not demobilize its force. And then Ukraine could be very vulnerable after a ceasefire is signed six to eight months into it if there are no genuine security guarantees from United States or anyone else. All they got was a piece of paper saying, “Ceasefire.” Russia had the opportunity to rearm, and the war is renewed. Except this time, Russia’s in a much more advantaged position given how things developed after the ceasefire. And for those not familiar with this war, it starts in twenty fourteen, and there were two failed ceasefires that never led to a political settlement, the first Minsk and the second Minsk agreement.
Michael Kofman
And so naturally, those of us who are familiar with this history both want to see a ceasefire but also wary that a ceasefire is just a piece of paper with those words on it but doesn’t lead to a lasting peace. And this is my concern that we will potentially see a third iteration of this war, that how this war ends takes us to the next one. And there are plenty of conflicts like this, wars between India and Pakistan, Arab-Israeli conflict, Armenia-Azerbaijan, where there are multiple wars in that series.
Lex Fridman
You’re implying there’s a, a low probability of success in the near term about the negotiation efforts. If y- if it turns out that they are successful, what does that look like? What, what do you think? What is the, the inkling of light as we search for some optimism that they are successful?
Michael Kofman
They get at least a partial ceasefire in place, compartmentalizing this war, ideally beginning with strikes against critical infrastructure by both sides, maybe also interdiction strikes in the Black Sea. Okay. And then maybe we start to see an agreement on a ceasefire for some period of days to then show both sides’ commitment to the fact that they want to engage in this political process in earnest. You usually have to start somewhere, and having a ceasefire lasting some period of days, a week, two weeks, a month, is that beginning. Right now, I don’t see Russia there willing to agree to something like this. Because if they were, there’s nothing that’s been stopping them. That proposal’s been on the table for a long time now. Right? They’re not interested.
Michael Kofman
Their position is they don’t want to agree to a ceasefire. They wish to settle all these complex, difficult issues, and only then will they offer a ceasefire. But the thrust of that position is they don’t see a ceasefire and negotiations right now as a better alternative to fighting at the end of the day. And that’s because Putin’s perception of the situation, from my point of view, is different from ours, and also I think differs to some extent from objective reality, or at least I suspect that that’s one of the inputs into his calculus.
Lex Fridman
If we look at longer term future, what does Ukraine look like after Zelenskyy? What does Russia look like after Putin?
Michael Kofman
This war will leave lasting damage on Ukraine and on Russia. That’s fundamentally – it’s a tragic war. And even though I think we will judge Ukraine ultimately as having been successful in defending its independence, the cost will be great. And I do imagine that better future because I do think that ultimately this will pass. It’s far from the first destructive European war. And unfortunately, in the history of Ukraine and Russia, it’s far from the first destructive war that’s been visited on these countries and on the people who live in them. So in that regard, it’s doubly tragic, and so many battles have been fought before in these same areas. It’s a tragic history to see that in twenty twenties we still have a large scale conventional war.
Michael Kofman
Taking place here. I think one of the outstanding questions, and to me this is kind of an implied question in what you’re asking about the future: Is Ukraine going to be viable as a state and as a nation after this war? I think so. Obviously, it depends somewhat on how the war ends, but more importantly, the kind of support Ukraine can hope to have from European countries. But if the rest of the nations in Europe, or at least the key ones, see Ukraine as European and as essential to European security, and as a member of that community, they will see to it, right? They will work with Ukraine to ensure that it’s successful. It will have to depend on them for some time. The question about Russia is a challenging one because Russia is not a problem of one person, right?
Michael Kofman
Russia’s a large country with a lot of people in it. People matter because they make decisions. Vladimir Putin cares far more about Ukraine than other Russian elites. In fact, many of them I think are mystified by this war that he’s launched. But nonetheless, some percentage of the population supports it, acquiesce to it, and hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of Russian men sign contracts to fight in it. This is the first large scale conventional war that Russia has fought where very few of the men were mobilized and many essentially took money and contracts to fight in them. So it’s not just Putin’s war. The question we are in some respects dealing with is one of Russia’s failed imperial transition, right?
Michael Kofman
And the fact that Russia has not become a post-imperial nation state in Europe. And I wanna make a broader point here that to me, this is in some respects a war of, I hate to frame it this way, but I think it’s useful, Soviet succession, because it’s resultant of that history that goes back to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which historians that I know argue was both an event, we remember it as happening and the dates it happened, but also a process. And that process is really one of imperial collapse, not just of the Soviet Union, but the Russian Empire that lay under it as a foundation. And this is fundamentally an imperialistic war by a state and by an elite, by a leader that couldn’t see another way of being and another vision for Russia.
Michael Kofman
And so one of the challenges we have is this failed transition from Russia. It’s not just that Russia doesn’t become democratic, it’s that whatever the political system may be, that the state has not stopped being a revisionist, revanchist, imperial state in Europe. But I don’t see this as deterministic or something that is certain or forever. The truth is that Europe was filled with countries that were imperial powers that also did not surrender their empires very easily.
Nature of war
Lex Fridman
Sherman famously said, “War is hell.” I’d like to talk to you about the nature of war, having studied it for so long. What do those words mean to you?
Preston Stewart
Feels like a sickness we can’t kick. For all the ways we’ve gotten better as people, as humans throughout our evolution, the one thing we keep coming back to is we kill each other over disputes, and it’s pretty crazy that we’re still doing that when you really think about it. There’s an aspect of war that’s fascinating to me because it brings out the– along that worst, it brings out the best and we see some wonderful stories, and we’re seeing that right now in Ukraine. But it is, when you really– when I really step back and think about it, it is depressing that this is still the way that we resolve differences. It’s crazy that we get to a point of who can kill more people to come to a conclusion. So it’s unfortunately no end in sight, I would say, but it’s a human condition.
Lex Fridman
What gives you hope for the future of human civilization? We’ve been talking about some dark topics. You ever sit back, look up at the sky, both of you have families, look up at the sky and say, “I think we’re gonna be – I think we’re gonna be all right. We’re gonna make it as a species”?
Preston Stewart
I’ll give you two real quick here. We just– my wife and I just watched the Stanford Prison Experiment on Netflix. You know what I’m talking about, the show that just came out? And at the end of that- … at the end of it, you’ve got all these people that had nothing in common, and they just spent a bunch of time together kinda trapped. They all became friends, and they came out the other side, and there was no political debates or anything like that. It was just cool to see so many different Americans in one spot come out the other side friendly, having a good time. That was great. That was a pick me up. In the context of what we’ve been talking about today with war, and specifically in Ukraine, there’s a new innovation on the robotics front that rolled out this past week-
Preston Stewart
… where they saved a soldier with a drone flying 30 kilometers away. So they put a soldier- … it’s a company called SkyFall, and they have essentially a casket- … underneath a drone. They flew this thing up to the front because they couldn’t get this soldier out. There were two of them. They couldn’t get him out any other way. They couldn’t walk him out. They couldn’t get the UGV ground robots in there to get him.
Michael Kofman
It’s CODE 9.2, the regiment I mentioned earlier. It’s them, and they’re one of the most innovative units.
Preston Stewart
They flew these in. In one of them, the guy’s buddies brought him out, packed him in, and they flew out. The other one, the guy crawled into the container himself. And then once they are in that pod, they have the ability to talk back with the crew so they’re not alone. And they can, “Hey, we’re getting there. Just so you know, we’re taking off. Here we go. A few more minutes. You’re doing great. Can’t wait to see you.” And they’re talking to him the whole way back. And the final, the video they shared with it, one of the guys was in the hospital
Lex Fridman
Being treated the day after with his kid right there on his lap. And I thought, “That is so cool.” So much money and technology and effort, and it wasn’t just one drone went out, and you push a button, and it go. They… There was shaping operations and coordination and infantry and armor- … and everything went into the role to get this one guy, 24-year-old, I think. Just go get him. Loved it.
Michael Kofman
Can I give you another anecdote, also from Cool Knight 2, ironically the same unit? You asked, you know, what gives me hope. So spend a lot of time studying war, dealing with war, and so you get to see, I think, some of the worst of humanity and also some of the best humanity, often in the same spaces. And if you travel the front line, you will see that, right? You will see basically the worst that humanity has to offer and the best, sometimes on the same day. Another anecdote from Cool Knight 2. You know, this fantastic video, a challenging one, but a great one, where they have two soldiers that are wounded. This is before Skyforger system was available. This is someone’s pack. Two soldiers are wounded.
Michael Kofman
They’re being evacuated by UGV, an uncrewed ground vehicle, and they’re both in it kind of like a, think of it as almost like a small truck, and it gets hit by a Russian drone, and it’s disabled, and they’re stuck out there, okay? They’re both wounded. They’re stuck in this UGV, and the company commander, without waiting, see them on video in a pickup truck racing to them, pulls up, backs up to them, gets out. He’s a really big guy, you can see in the video, not wearing any body armor-
Michael Kofman
… didn’t even bother to throw on his plate carrier. Goes and grabs one guy, throws him in the pickup, goes and grabs a second guy, throws him in the pickup, and speeds out of there, and they all make it out. Obviously incredibly dangerous. There are many moments like this that you can see in a war that they do give you hope. And also the– I mean, I’ll tell you the last part. This may sound silly. It’s a grim enterprise. The thing that gets everyone through it is a dark sense of humor, which you need to have in this profession- … as well. Um- … people who have been fighting for a long time, still you can see haven’t lost their humanity.
Lex Fridman
At every level. The humor, the wry smile. The ability to, yeah, show love towards each other. It’s great. That’s a, man, that’s such a complicated thing about war. It really does show some of the most beautiful aspects of human nature.
Michael Kofman
It does.
Lex Fridman
Sometimes we need tragedy to, like, really bring out the best in us.
Michael Kofman
It’s a stark contrast when you see it, right? It’s contrasted much… It’s in sharper relief than if you are going day to day in your normal life.
Lex Fridman
Well, Preston, first of all, I wanna say thank you. You gave me this gift.
Michael Kofman
Absolutely, man. How about that?
Lex Fridman
That I’m gonna have to drink soon, and all of us like ships in the night literally met at night and made this happen. This is a huge honor to finally meet the both of you. Thank you so much for everything you do in the world, and thank you so much for this conversation. This was awesome.
Michael Kofman
Thank you.
Lex Fridman
Thank you, Lex. It’s been great.
Michael Kofman
Yeah. Thanks for hosting this and for inviting us.
Lex Fridman
Thank you for listening to this conversation with Preston Stewart and Michael Kofman. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.