Zelensky Fires His Defense Minister: Soldiers Speak Out (Part 1)

Welcome back to another episode of the Ukraine Military History Podcast. My name is Sam Cook. I'm the founder of the Ukraine Military History Institute and the co- host of the Ukraine Military History Podcast where we examine Ukrainian military history from the beginning all the way to the current war against Russia. And today's episode is from the current war series with our military

analysts Rob Lee, Dima Putyata and a special guest Ryan O'Leary who's an active service member in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. And what they were discussing today, and it's timely, it's a huge historical moment, is the dismissal of the cabinet under President Zelensky. As of July 15, 2026, President Zelensky dismissed his entire cabinet, the prime minister, and submitted a new set of

candidates to take over, including the new prime minister. But most controversially, he dismissed the defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who'd only been in office for six months, was widely respected by a lot of members of the military but also Ukrainian civil society broadly and his dismissal has triggered a very big crisis inside Ukrainian government and civil society with protests on the

street for the second day in a row as of today's filming. And what Rob and Dima and Ryan all get together and discuss is a very lengthy discussion on the thinking behind this move, the political ramifications of it, how the soldiers feel, how society feels about it. Of course all of them living here in Kiev like myself and we split it up into two part series because there's just so much

material here. I want to give you a chance to digest it. The first episode here is really about the political thinking behind this, the decision- making, introducing you to Ryan who this is his first time appearing on the podcast and they go into this in detail some colorful moments especially with Ryan who is not holding back on what a lot of soldiers feel that he is communicating through his position here on the podcast so enjoy.

Alright everyone this Rob Lee it's another installment of the Ukrainian Military History Podcast. As usual, I'm joined by my colleague, Dmitry Putyata, and this time with my friend Ryan O'Leary, who we've talked to many times before. Guys, good to see you again.

Good to see you, too.

Yeah, good to see you.

All right, so we were filming this on July, I think, 18th, on Friday the 18th.

17th.

17th. Okay, thank you, Ryan, already helping. It's on the 17th, so it's probably come out in a week or so. And basically, we're going to discuss the events of the week. It's been pretty kind of tumultuous week here in Kiev where there's been a government reshuffle. The big news kind of that the former defense minister Mikhail Fyodorov has been replaced.

Right now the president Zelensky has put forward Kamara, the former commander or the head of acting head of SBU, former commander of SBU alpha. This has led to significant kind of pushback. There's been protests in Kiev, protests in other places. There's been a bigger kind of generational kind kind of discussion because there's a conversation is partially about the kind of younger generation versus older generation,

a variety of kind of interesting topics here. So it's main thing we're gonna talk about is kind of what's happening right now and ask both of you since you're veterans, you're still serving Ryan, do you mean you got out, what kind of your take on what's happening, talk about some of the internal problems, you create a military and kind of your take on, the developments this week.

Yeah, I think it would be great because from what I saw on Twitter, frankly speaking, people definitely a little bit delusional in terms of everything. You can see a lot of support in terms of federal, but I think that the back idea of that it's not only just to support federal as a person, maybe as a future politician, but the idea is here not to allow other people with is maybe not the best past to take the role of this position.

But we can see that some people from National Guard supported the Clemente composition, which was quite surprisingly for me, frankly speaking. But at the same time, we see these changes. I don't think the President will turn it over. that we will continue seeing this kind of development or I would say degradation rather and we will have a new Ministry of Defense and Fedorov as he at his latest

present kind of meeting he told the publicity a lot of problems that Ukrainian Army has that's absolutely true some of them appeared during this war another one it's like last for decades and it seems like after especially after four years in the army and being part of the system it seems like that some of things are not changeable to be honest at least here and right now because it's very hard to do some reforms during the war for any country

but the thing is that you definitely need to do this you must do some reforms because they will be painful, not all of them will like, not because they might be bad, just because people might not understand the back idea of this, due to the lack of experience or just maybe tunnels way of thinking and other things. But right now we have this quite a bad situation, the federal kind

kind of pull everything on red and officially accuse Sursky in a lot of fails, which you can support or you cannot. I mean, it depends. I do want to say that I strongly support Fedorov in all of his statements that he said recently, because I know that just as for Fedorov, the same is for third case sometimes it's very hard to change something even if you're in charge of that because it's like every time happens here in Ukraine

when we have a new president people expect way too much from a person from Parliament and you want to see quick reforms like in six five months and everything should be changed drastically but it doesn't work like that for some in some cases for some big reforms it takes even five and more years when you will see this kind of impact. And you know, it's like reminded me this kind of recent

articles that journalists, some journalists had a conversation with Ukrainian, I suppose, battalion and brigade commander anonymously that he said, Oh, I don't feel the impact on the frontline because of middle strikes. Of course you don't because it takes a lot of time. You cannot just destroy 40 trucks and a couple of bridges and you will see the instant impact. It takes a lot of time, at least six months, even more. Then you will see

Russian slowing down and you cannot only rely on you know on middle strike and things that oh they stopped Russian advance. Russian advance stops at tactical and of course at the operational level and of course with the pressure at the strategic level while we are targeting the strategic like refineries and factories and stuff like that.

So you mentioned Glomenko, the head of the interior ministry, his name put forward this week that he was the initial choice to replace Fedorov and then appears that he didn't have enough support yesterday and so then what it seems to be the reporting said is that Zelensky came up with I guess multiple names to replace Fedorov and then ultimately chose Kamara at least in the acting role, but it's still not clear exactly what he's gonna replace him.

And yeah, and you were saying before, the commander of the Azov Corps at Redis, commander of the Hartea Corps, or Cornet, both supported him, both said kind of positive things. So other people did as well, but there was in general a kind of backlash to his kind of name being put forward compared to Fedorov, because Fedorov is seen as kind of this more modern kind of facing guy, and then maybe not the same thing from the Attyrion Ministry,

doesn't always have the best kind of reputation you know historically. Ryan

what's your take on this week? Oh boy I mean there's a lot to unpackage. Let's keep the language here PG PG. I mean there's been a lot of changes I think I think Ukraine shoots itself in the foot all the time with this stuff like if you ask anyone from like anyone who's served for a while the changes that were happening in 2026 has been mainly positive you have you know better logistics better supply of drones some brigades for the most part we're

getting more listened to when it comes to procurement and like the I think the standardization of you know the drone warfare spectrum was a good idea so I I mean, things were moving in a very good, you know, forward pace or forward momentum. And like at the ministry defense level, it was probably the first time where, you know, the MOD was like actually doing public outreach, actually, you know, showing results and like moving forward

and like actually innovating and like doing stuff. Look, I've been here since 2022. Typically the MOD is the MOD, nobody really knows fully what's going on, who's doing what. And so like Fedorov sort of changed that and more stuff was becoming, you know, in front of the public, like, hey, we're trying to do X, Y, Z. You know, this is where we're at with this part, this part, this part. So I think, I think for Ukrainians,

it was a huge, you know, change of pace. I think for service members in general, whether foreign or Ukrainian, it was, you know, a positive thing and like a, not really a motivator, but a morale booster saying, hey, look, they're actually listening to us. I do have my criticisms, obviously. I think the foreign side of things was going really slow, but it's never really been a priority for Ukraine. I think one of the biggest issues

that Zelensky is gonna keep facing is they always keep changing the ministers of whatever minister of defense, prime minister, minister of whatever department, but at the end of the day, there's one area that never changes. And I think next time, instead of messing around with the ministries, should just gut the general staff and switch it out. So that's my personal opinion.

Pretty bold opinion.

Yeah, but I mean, like, look, man, like, we've been facing the same issues since 2023 with, you know, the mindset towards mobilization, the morale and like the, I would say, respect of the ministries and respect of the military. Like, there's just been a gradual decline. And if we look who's been in charge the majority of that time, you know, the only ones that aren't changing is the general staff.

So like if, and I put this out on Twitter like two weeks ago, you know, if you're running a business and you're, you consistently have employee turnover, you know, low work quality, low work effort, do you just consistently keep that going or do you find out what's wrong with the management and change up the management? know your military is the same thing it needs to be a well-oiled machine if it's

only oiled in certain parts and not the other than you need to change the leadership out whoever that would be I don't know I just know like it's not working as it is especially for foreigners at the general staff level I mean we're a year four in the war and you still can't do a I used to as a foreigner it's four years in the war we don't have access to army of plus we

don't have access to DIA. The residency route is a cluster is a mess. You can't transfer from the National Guard to land forces legally. You can't transfer from the National Guard to SSO. The only way to do anything is basically cancel contract, wait two months, sign a new contract. And like there's this issue where there's it's hard to retain foreigners but it's also at the same

time hard to retain, mobilize because everyone goes AWOL. Like there's a lot of compounding issues that just aren't getting addressed. So change the management, address the issues, move on.

Right. I want to come back to that because you wrote a thing for Substack about issues about how foreign fliers are treated and some recommendations about how to kind of improve the system. So we'll come back in a second. So I think, you know, Fedorov, he's been in charge for about six months, so it's a short tenure. The previous minister before that also is about six months. I think it's an issue where you need ministers in place for

longer because in particular being in minister of defense it's really a bureaucratic role but you have to understand the bureaucracy. And so I think it's similar in the US where a secretary of defense who's at war where it's nice to have military background but you need to be someone who understands the bureaucracy and how to run it. And one of the benefits of Federal is that because the ministry didn't change information

for five years or whatever, that ministry when the war began started taking on new responsibilities. So the MOD was taking care of regular procurement for artillery, tanks, regular systems. Ministry of Digital Information took over procurement of UAVs, of new technology, new innovations. And of course, Fedorov set up Brave One, this incubator startup thing for the Ukraine defense companies. So he had his hands in a lot of things.

And so when he took over his ministry of defense, he already had a background seeing problems in procurement, problems in the defense industry, foreign support, and so on. So he was almost uniquely in a good position to understand, to make changes quickly without having to take six months to learn what's happening. He actually had a good idea initially on. I thought it was quite positive when he was chosen initially for that reason.

He is quite tech savvy and this war is a high tech war. And I think a lot of people, I feel like I'm too old in some respects because the drone stuff changes very quickly. I did not study radio signals enough when I was in the Marines, I should've. But a lot of those things are much more complex and you need to have understanding of these things. So when he came in, he had a number of forms he tried to implement.

So he had one about new contracts for service members, that was trying to fix the mobilization system to some extent. There's other issues about trying to have a quality in brigades of manpower, where everyone's in the same amount of manpower. Right now he knows a significant variation where some brigades get very few people, some regiments get a lot of people and it's not equal at all. And also some kind of standardization of drones

because for Mavix, for commercial drones, FPVs, units always rely on donations. They don't get enough from the government and you try to kind of streamline that among other kind of things. I think a lot of these things were positive steps. The execution I don't think always worked and it's not clear the execution is easy in that respect but I think conceptually the ideas were good whether or not it would have worked over time

is kind of a broader question. But again, he only had six months. It's kind of hard to achieve what you want in six months. I would say the general feeling, right, is that this war, the situation's gotten better in the war the last six months. Now, to what extent is that him being minister of defense or other kind of factors, probably a combination. Go ahead.

You're absolutely right, it's definitely a combination. We cannot praise or criticize one man or one ministry for everything. And you mentioned that Fedor was the Minister of Defense for six months. But before Fedor we had Shmyhal who was the Minister of Defense for, I don't know, for much less than six months. And we continue doing this kind of replacements without giving people a chance.

Right.

Of course, previous Minister of Defense, for example, Mirov, he was the Minister of Defense for a long period of time. And if we look back how it happens that Fedor became the Minister of Defense, to understand what happened in Ukraine back then. We had this scandal with Minditgat, kind of, how you call it, where president seems like he decided to again to...

Shuffle the board.

Yeah, kind of, to do kind of nothing, but in the same time to to replace some people and Fedorov became a Minister of Defense and I think that he would never ever be a Minister of Defense if this scandal wouldn't happen. But unfortunately we have these problems with replacing people in a couple of months not only from the you know from the presidential perspective but also in

the army. Somehow we think that if you if you have a new Brigade commander for example he need to be good in a couple of months but the point is Brigade if for example, I consist of four thousand, five thousand men. I mean, some of them are, but a lot of them, nope. But still, there are a lot of things in brigade. And you need a lot of time to find out who is good there,

who is not, how to communicate with them. But somehow we... I know a couple of brigades, they change brigade commander three times per year. It's not enough for potential colonel or mayor who is in charge of the brigade to show himself as a good leader, as a good manager. So it's one of the problems that we definitely will discuss later, but I don't really understand why do we expect so much changes in such

short period of time. We really expect way too much. And talking about these improvements in the form line we need to understand that they started maybe more than a year ago while Russian changed the tactics from normal assault groups with infantry fighting vehicles with groups that consisted of 7-10 stormtroopers with the support of UAVs so this so-called infiltration of course it appears to be

right now definitely not efficient as Russians expected it to be and all of this it's like you started something for example one year and a half ago and right now we see the result. And now we see the results that Ryan mentioned that we definitely see this new approach we saw this new approach of defense that we gave our maneuver brigades more capabilities for this

that was one of the biggest problems that we had and we still have because right now we see that For example, the manned system forces, they are trying to, which is absolutely right, trying to put the attention to middle strike and deep strike. But before that, and still right now, they have thousands of drone operators who are working at tactical level. And literally fighting from zero line to 10 kilometers deep.

Maybe in some cases more, but this is like the vast majority of them. And of N, not surprisingly, they're working with the same tools as maneuver brigades did. I mean still do. So it's definitely a lot of things that started before. And right now we see much better results because of this.

I think too, like, so I don't know, again, like, I agree with you. I don't know if you can put everything on Fedorov or before Fedorov. But the biggest thing that Fedorov did is he opened it up. He showed, hey, these are results so far. This is what we're moving to. So I feel like there was just more communication. He kept the Ukrainian people more aware of what's going on.

There was less questions on, hey, what is the Ministry of Defense actually doing? The last six months, we were never questioning, what is the MOD spending the money on? What are they doing procurement? saw the increase of our drones that we were receiving with the unit I'm in. You could see the gradual shift from this whole kill everyone at a kilometer deep at the front line to hey you know now we're expanding into you know like the

Hornet gets a lot of it but there's other fixed wing mid-strike drones that if you pay attention on certain telegrams like you can see a drastic increase in that. So like I don't know if you can give it all to Federer out for the credit on it but what you can give him is that he was the one saying hey you know, this is what we're actually doing. He was more open about it. And with that, you know, the biggest thing

that I've noticed with Ukrainian society is there's always this, you know, fear question of what the ministers are doing, what the government's doing. And like, I think by Fedorov opening up the Ministry of Defense a little bit more than what's normally there, it brought some trust back into, you know, what people perceived as the MOD actually doing. I think a lot of people, Ukrainians and foreigners, also then attribute all that to Fedorov.

But in reality, him just opening up, doing better at press briefings, at bringing on advisors like Sergey Flashe, Sternenko, and doing outreach actually showed, hey, this is the actual improvement. So even if it's not all attributed to Fedorov, him opening up and showing where money's getting used, where resources are, where the time's being spent, I think it restored a lot of faith in the M.O.D. at least up until now.

I think with this whole reshuffle, and like I think Westerners also need to understand once you fire the Prime Minister or the Prime Minister resigns, whatever, like the ministers all get pulled out too. So like they didn't just fire Fedorov, like it had to be done legally. But like he could have also then, you know, re-put him as a candidate. But I think people need to understand that, you know, the trust in the institutions is

the biggest thing that's lacking in Ukraine, which is like, look, I don't hate Sirsky, I don't like him, it's whatever. But the biggest thing is there's no trust in the general staff anymore. There definitely isn't with foreign fighters. And I don't think the Ukrainian servicemen are very well liking the general staff either. Obviously, they won't speak out. I'll speak out because I'm a foreigner. They put me in jail, no big deal.

I'll get back out and go back to my unit. I've been here four years, I've been in far worse than in trouble with the Ukrainian government. But I think the biggest issue that Fedorov did, or the biggest thing that he did that was an advantage or a positive, was basically like, and probably not even on purpose, but he brought back some trust back into the MOD, back to the public, and that's the biggest thing that's lacking in Ukraine.

So why we have mobilization issues, partly, not fully. But like, so I think whoever it is, whether it's Kamara or the former interior minister, whoever does it, like, they just need to be more open and they're gonna have to build that trust back up again. We're probably like below zero now for trust.

I absolutely agree with you that he did great in terms of showing what kinda they're planning to do because we definitely had a huge gap in this. But, and I think that's the reason why people support him. It's all about public affairs. Yeah, because he's a former SMM manager and he knows how to, you know, sell, how to introduce yourself to the publicity.

But you know, another thing about this is that, you know, after the summer offensive failed in 2023, it didn't seem as though Ukraine had a coherent strategy for like two years.

Well, I don't think anyone really ever took the time to lay out a strategy to the public like Well, whatever you know, you can argue was Fedorov's strategy good. Was it wrong? Was it burning down the house? Like, you know depending who you ask, but at the end of the day at least he voiced a strategy and like again That's what helped rebuild the trust for the Ukrainians and probably the foreign partners as well as basically he was like

Hey, look, I'm doing this this and this and we want to do it within this time frame Like here's you know our feedback loop. Here's a number you can call or telegram You can message and we'll listen to your feedback do they listen all that probably not but like at least he laid out something of a strategy and started following through some of it was like Very minor steps and some of it was never gonna get completed if we're honest

Like he was saying about this whole mobilization reform from the top down bottom up like most people understand That's like, you know the golden goose it'll never fully happen But at least he said it, you know, at least he's like hey, this is what we're going for And like that's the first time in four years. I've been here that what that's been done

Sorry, is it definitely increases your morale because as Rob mentioned we felt was our kind of the largest counter-offensive Of course, I remember myself back then Well, frankly speaking I was doomed and asked myself. Okay, what we are doing next next? What was the strategy? How we gonna win and what does to win this war mean for Ukraine? I just found this answer for myself that we need to stop Russians and of course

we cannot talk at least back then, cannot talk about bringing occupied territories back. So bad. The key idea we should stop Russians and make Ukrainians live here and you know like not to fail as a nation. Fine, okay, but how to achieve this? That was the biggest question for me. Even my rank was a sergeant. I'm also a human being and I am a citizen of this country and I will

ask myself how we're going to achieve this, what we are doing and what I had? Absolutely silence. And of course no one is supposed to tell me how we're going to do this, but at least after years of four you expect to see some kind of strategy but I and but I just some period of time I realize that we have in a lot of cases zero strategy in terms of economy in terms of war in general

there's probably strategies that are talked about but again the biggest thing is the Ukrainian institutions are terrible like we don't have them yeah you have them but it's just nobody knows how to talk to the public and then if they do they're always like oh we can't because it's part of war blah blah blah state secret but in reality if somebody just came out and said hey our goal isn't just to survive we want to do X Y Z

you know at least that would show like hey this is what we're actually doing like again I think Fedorov did an amazing job with that whether some of his goals were realistic or his objectives were realistic most likely not but at least he said it at least he said you know because at that point once you say it, you own it. And if you own it, that means like people are going to hold you to it. So at least

they say, hey, look, you know, if, if he was still the minister seven months from now and mobilization isn't changed or the recruitment isn't changed, at least we know we can say, hey, what about this that you were going to do? And you know, then, you know, there's somebody that actually has responsibility when you put out clear objectives, clear goals, clear path forward, you not only own

it, but now there's responsibility. So people actually feel that they, you know, have someone to go to when it doesn't happen. And Ukraine is very bad at doing that, both on a military level

and on a political level with institutions. So I think, you know, one of the things that identifies as kind of an issue, you know, after some offensive, is that Ukraine, you'd hear things about tactics or operation, but not strategic level. It was below that, we're like, okay, we're going to try to do this or this. And it's like, okay, but what is the strategy? So, example, the Kursk

Operation. Kursk operation, the initial execution is very good. It didn't last too long. But again, it came back to, okay, how does Kursk fit into a broader strategy? And that was never, never clear to me, whereas it was an effective operation at the operational level. But then of course, the strategy is, you know, to, to, maybe it's okay, it's gonna be a limited operation to get POWs, so you can trade back people, or to, to force Russia to commit

resources elsewhere on the border away from Dinesh region. Okay. But the overall strategy, you know, is a small part of it. It seemed to me it took over the strategic thinking, where it's like, okay, now Kursk is everything, because we've made it a big political thing. It's embarrassing to Putin. But is that actually, you know, a theory? Exactly. Is it a theory of

success? And to me, it was never clear what it was. And so I think, you know, when I was hearing about Thoreau the first time, he came up with a strategy in 2024. And he was already kind of of circling this inside and the government. And it was already, you know, it was like, again, you can point out issues with it, but he had a coherent strategy for the war, saying here is what we need to do, here's the steps to get there,

here's the ultimate objective, right? It was a realistic objective. And when he came in, I think it was quite useful to bring this in, because again, for us in the US, we always have some kind of national security strategy. We have a, the DOD has own, I forgot what it was, a defense strategy, I forget, I should know better. We do a quadrino review every four years as well. There are issues with all these documents.

Anytime the documents come out, they get attacked and people pick at the words and so on. But it becomes a thing where the senior government levels, they are laying out intent, saying, here's how we see the world, here's how we see defense. And everyone below that says, okay, here's where I fit into this strategy. If you don't have a strategy, then units are doing things, but it's like, what are we building to as only queer?

Federal, I mean this year he mentioned he wanted to get the Russian cali-t number to 50,000. I personally didn't think that was the best kind of figure. First off, because I'm not sure you can achieve it. Second, I think the attrition ratio is more important in some respects. But again, it was okay, we were going to try to increase the number of Russian cali-t's. This is how we see some theory of victory of century.

Of course, you have the deep strike campaign, middle strike campaign, increasing problems for Russian logistics, increasing costs. And this is kind of back to the theory of victory of, okay, we make the war like un-stable for Russia to some extent, while denying them the ability to take more territory. And so then it came, you know, you had some kind of strategy, I think, which was useful. You said it's useful to kind of say, okay,

does this make sense? Does it not make sense? But at least it's being voiced. I agree with you, I think it was very good that he had a bigger public messaging campaign because people need to know what's going on. Soldiers of the frontline need to know what's going on. If they don't know, what are we, you know, how long was the war gonna go on? How do my actions fit within a broader strategy? Those are questions that are not good to have.

It should have some kind of answer, right? So I think all those things were positive. I agree, I think people are making a black and white issue where everything that succeeded is because of him. And it's like, well, I think he did good things. He's had a hand in middle strike, hand in drones, hand in a lot of these things. It's the result of success of a lot of people, right?

festival of servicemen. Yes. And even of that general sense that all of us don't like.

But I think the biggest issue we're going to have going forward, or Ukraine's going to have, is like, Kamara, I've worked with people under him before, great at strategy, great at operational, great at asymmetrical warfare. But the problem is, he's coming from an operational group, SB Alpha, they're not public, they don't do public affairs, like have one or two public affairs guys for whatever 20,000 of them. But that's what I mean like

they're not good at the public outreach and for him to be a queer SBU, SBU alpha guy like he's gonna struggle you know when it comes to addressing the public not so much addressing to our allies behind the scenes but like it's always better when again somebody like Fedorov says publicly this is what we're doing because even though you know the public's always going

to get one side of it and then behind the scenes you're going to have it for the western allies but then your western allies can also go to their own people and say hey yeah this is what they're doing and i think kamara is going to be good like kamara will be good at the you know probably fixing some of the issues but he's going to be really bad at communicating what the issues are that he's

fixing how he's fixing it and what the path forward i don't know if the minister of interior is going to be any better at it. I hope they hire a public affairs person that knows what they're doing, otherwise there's gonna struggle. I mean like struggle not really so much like they might do good work behind the scenes but they're gonna struggle with the public perception, they're gonna struggle with

public trust, and then you know six months from now we'll have another Ministry of Defense because Zelensky is tired of the public protests and you're getting angry about you know things not being done because if it's not communicated what's being done, people get upset.

I think, I tweeted about this the other day, but Kamara said, he's very well respected. Career Alpha officer, Career Special Operations officer. Keep in mind, SPU Alpha is not a military unit. So, his background is not going through like Company Command, Battalion Command, so on. It is a very specialized counter-terrorism unit, domestic counter-terrorism unit, that

has now branched out into a variety of things because of the war. It's maybe one of the most innovative units in Ukraine. It did Operation Spiderweb. They're always near the top in E-points. They've gone very heavily into drones at task level, operational, strategic level. President Zelensky mentioned yesterday he wants him kind of overseeing Deep Strike. I'm not sure that's really what the Minister of Defense should be doing.

I think all I've heard is good things about him, that he's a trustworthy person, which is important, but also he's very, very competent. But the question is, what background do you need to be successful Minister?

Absolutely.

I think he'll have procurement experience and stuff like that because SBU runs their own setup compared to your general staff, ministry of defense. But yeah, I think when it comes to fixing some of the issues, he'll be good at some he's not going to be good at. Mobilization, look, SBU doesn't mobilize people typically. They mobilize them. They help with mobilization. SBU especially SB office all voluntary it's a very select few that make it

even through selection like he might I think he's gonna struggle with a lot of the more of your mainstream military issues right and how to change that but like I think a lot of it'll be whose advisors are and again like I think his biggest hurdles gonna be public like how can he change public perception back into hey you know Fedorov's gone but look we're still gonna continue you know

increasing our effectiveness, fixing, reforming the drought, our mobilization, reforming procurement, you know, and like I don't I think he can do a lot of it but I think his biggest issue is gonna be the public perception and that's gonna be the biggest, you know, if he lasts six months, one month, like even if he ends up being the permanent one that'll be his biggest issue. I think

same with the Minister of Interior because neither one of them are really a public-facing person. I don't know if there's really a good fit for an M.O.D.

that's public face right now? Well to be honest, first of all everyone will compare Maro with Fedorov. Yeah yeah yeah. And another thing is that from my perspective I think that Maro has this problem which is not problem that he is a soldier from the bottom of his heart and being in charge of MFD it's frankly speaking it's a little bit different and if you don't

mind I'll come back to the topic about 50k per month. From my perspective when the first time I heard it back then I was a serviceman. It was definitely for me a populist statement to be honest because it's also was a question for me okay to kill more Russians sounds good sounds great no one will doubt that but what if we will pay more attention to the topic where we will

secure our forces because sometimes you of course you need to destroy your enemy at different deaths and different levels absolutely true but we have a lot of issues right still for years that our maneuver brigades who are responsible for the front and seems like responsible for everything they don't have even right now needed support from other units and even from the army corps

because it's quite hard for them to fight under the command which they would be detached. And for me it's all the time a mix whether you need to destroy more enemies and secure your forces. Because okay we kill five Russians but two Ukrainians also being killed. Is it good for us? I don't think so. Or wounded. I mean if you lost your eye, leg, whatever, you're out of military.

So it's bad people do not ask and think about that seems like but it's it's good to make this kind of statement that we will destroy as much as possible. Yeah right but also another question how to achieve that. What if your enemy is not advancing in some areas? For example the last year I spent there was in Le Mans the set army corps literally stopped there at once and Russians were are not capable of moving forward.

So it was on regular basis that we saw with a couple of drones across the front line and no one was moving there. So what to do in this case? Of course they advanced in some areas because they also limited their resources like Alexandria direction, Nehulai Polar, kind of across direction, but the rest of the front line is kind of dead. So no one also told me how to achieve that and what to do next.

Like like so I've been pretty vocal about anti 50k a month The the biggest thing also people tend to forget is we're limited on manpower So if we're allocating all of these drone teams to kill 50,000 Russians a month That means we're taking away the allocation ability for them to do deep strike not deep strike for them to do mid strike mid strike being like 20 to 100 kilometers where your drone logistics are where you know

your assembly plants are everything like that so like when we're doing the 50,000 a month like it sounds good on paper until you realize that we're focusing a majority of our assets into doing this and It doesn't do much when your enemy has Whatever two million reserves that they haven't even called up yet And like I think we put too much emphasis on it and it didn't like it We didn't really stop a lot of the Russian progress

You know and I think we could have handled it better by going after logistics going more in-depth like a majority of our strikes for the first four months of this year was within a kilometer of the zero line like and why are we you know killing your enemy at the zero line yeah it's not a strategy any military ever does the goal is to kill them before they get to your troops not while their

troops are engaging them so I think we should have put more emphasis on preventing them from even getting close to us especially in winter time look August September October when it started getting cold this was like the coldest winter on record I would much rather we you know make them walk 20 kilometers to zero versus you know them being able to drive five kilometers and then they get

hit at one kilometer like let's tire them out make them walk make them freeze

to death before they even get close to the zero okay so I would say so Fedorov did mention 50,000 a month but he also has been pushing the middle strike yeah So I mean, it's not neither or for him. He's done both. Some of this comes back to the strategic thinking, right? Because are you adopting an attritional strategy where you are inflicting too many losses on 616 00:40:30,120 --> 00:40:33,640 your side as a way of winning or ending the war?

Or are you trying to attack the system, the maneuver warfare type thinking where you say, here's the center of gravity of the Russian military, here's the critical vulnerability, we're going to remove this. And that's our way of kind of stopping the actual advance. The problem with the nutritional strategy, okay, first off, Russia has more people. As a country, they are remarkably insensitive to casualties, right?

They're taking massive casualties. There are no massive protests in Russia happening. Where is that breaking point is, I don't know. That is a very difficult thing to say. Is it now, if Russia does mobilization in a few months, which people are mentioning, will that lead to political problems? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe Russia then has 200,000 more people, which they can commit to Chernihiv, a new offensive, who knows.

Crimea is also a good question too, because we're seeing a successful campaign there, where Ukraine is isolating Crimea, massive fuel shortages, fuel shortages across Russia right now. Really big logistics issues in Crimea, there's no electricity, used to be this great vacation place in the summertime, Russians are not vacationing there anymore. was this really important foreign policy objective of Putin's, right? Where all the things he can say,

here's what I achieved. I took back Crimea. It's a pop-orthing among Russians, at least it was before the war. Even the Volni kind of supported it more or less. But now Crimea is not a strength, right? Now Ukraine reliably can hit pretty much anything they want within Crimea. There are no military targets that are particularly safe there. The Black Sea fleet was removed. You know, there's

reporting at the Black Sea headquarters might have been removed, so on. But the question is, okay, Crimea now is a liability. It's much more difficult for Russia there. But what does that mean? What does this mean in the context of ending the war? Because remember, the 2023 summer offensive, the idea behind it was that if you threaten Crimea, Putin cares enough about Crimea where

he might make a deal. He might say, okay, what's coming terms? What if no one rises up? What if It's like okay. Yeah, crime is it's not a good situation, but you know Russians will leave whatever But ultimately if Russians just put up with it they get used to it and there's no pressure on Putin Is it actually a way of ending the war that part is still not clear to me?

I don't think like I don't think Crimea is gonna end the war by us blowing up gas stations whatever else but like there is clearly a difference between a Bunch of Russian bodies getting sent back to Russia versus you know some dumbass not being able to Some person not being able to fill their like their their fuel up like man do I think it's okay there

There's been there's been far more Russians complaining about not being able to get gasoline than they have about all the dead going back So like look, this should be a this should be a pretty like you know Positive thing that you cranged to be able to look at me like look they don't care that 50,000 Russians are going home in boxes and Missing legs every month. But what do they care about?

They care about not getting fuel in their vehicles and they don't they care about having electricity

Well, I mean, I think it's a it's absolutely a positive dynamic, right? I also that you know, if you look at the war a year ago when Trump took office It was a point where you know Trump said famously like, you know, Zelensky have no cards where Russia has the kind of leverage And if they didn't negotiate Russia was demanding not just freezing the front line, but also all the rest in yes region

Right is that you need to make concessions in the war now the leverage has changed Right because Ukraine is much more leverage if there were negotiations and you know, who knows it's gonna happen This dynamic is better and so when negotiations happen, I think from Ukraine's perspective, it's like, okay, we can freeze the front line. We're not going to make any other concessions

beyond that because we don't need to, because you can't advance and we can see the cost you're having in Russia. That dynamic is definitely positive. The point I'm raising is where is the breaking point for Russia? Where is the point where you do this, you attack this one thing, you remove this from Russia, you cause Putin to half negotiate. I don't know exactly what that is.

I would say if we're talking like Crimea or occupied areas, I would say the breaking point is going to be when the Russian Military needs to move assets into these areas to keep governance. What I mean by that is like look for Crimea The people are only going to put up without having running water without having electricity Without having fuel for their vehicles only for so long. Maybe they leave

I mean if they leave then what are they gonna like then there's like that's fine Everyone leaves perfect lower economy for them. Yeah, they lose all their port access stuff They basically lose everything if they leave then like your military units They're gonna suffer because look on both sides neither one of them can do logistics to where they have three meals a day Like I mean everyone uses local shops. So if everyone leaves Crimea

Militaries screwed. Yeah, so like I think the breaking point is gonna be when Russia either says, okay Look, we have to move a bunch of air assets in to make sure our little civilian guys are happy You know the little land occupiers or if they leave then what then Crimea is just a blank open space with nobody there like I mean, I think Russia's getting to a point where

They're gonna have to pick and choose whether they defend Moscow st. Petersburg or they move assets into the occupied areas I would assume Ukraine's gonna start smacking the crap out of Donetsk Luhansk as well and not just Crimea Well, they've been doing that but I mean like on the same levels as Crimea So like if they end up having all these issues in Donetsk Luhansk as well and everything goes to a halt and there's no more economy

What are you gonna do with the seven million Russians that moved in since 2014? You either protect them or they leave or you have governance issues or you do that when you do mobilization you Mobilize occupied areas first. I don't think there's anyone to mobilize

Yeah, maybe not. I mean, it will be, I don't want to say easy, but it will be possible for them to mobilize up to 100k. So, then some people from who are like voluntarily signed the contract, and then some small secret mobilizations of Russia, so they will have not enough manpower. But in general, frankly speaking, it will lead literally to nowhere.

But I think it's a lot it's a lot easier for Russia to hide bodies than it is seven million people getting pissed off

Well, but they're not even hiding bodies. I mean people people know the cow. Yeah, they're just you know They're like look some are some are signing contracts Others are being forced in it, but usually because they have criminal issues or they're like the drugs of society whatever the overall Russia as a country is Okay with this to some extent right?

I'm not saying Russians are happy with the word thing a lot a lot of my thing with before the war ended But it's not such an issue that they're gonna rise up and-

No, I don't think you'll see them rise up either, but they're gonna create governance issues if people keep getting unhappy. Like you can only keep things in check for so long before, you know, shit hits the fan. I don't think they're gonna rise up and storm, you know, military barracks, but like it'll create an issue for Russia. Like obviously if there's- there'll be crime, there'll be other stuff. I mean, look, you have to have-

People have to have some semblance of livelihood, otherwise it'll all just go south. No one's gonna live in Crimea if they can't provide for their families, if they can't drive to work. I mean, it'll get bad if Ukraine keeps doing it. And again, I think by making the people who moved in to occupy this land uncomfortable every day of their life for the next six months, especially over winter, I think it'll create a problem with Russia.

Is it like, is Crimea gonna rise up and overthrow government? No, but it's gonna create governance issues for the Russians. And like, either Russia's gonna waste a bunch more money trying to keep the economy afloat in Crimea, doing whatever they can to protect stuff, or they say, well, we don't care about Crimea, and then if it happens and Donetsk and the Huns, and they say, oh, we're gonna protect Moscow,

St. Petersburg, they're definitely gonna have issues. I don't think, again, it's not gonna be like them attacking the military, but they're gonna run into all sorts of issues trying to keep them afloat economically?

Frankly speaking, I think it's clear that Russia in general doesn't care about Crimea. And they also don't care about, for example, Belgarut, which is also under fire. No one cares about each other. All of them live in their small castles under the governor, and they're quite fine with that. But I would like to move forward a little bit and to ask a question. Okay, we are striking Crimea.

of our so-called middle strikes take part in the Southern direction and the question is what's next and I think that's one of the things that divided Fedorov and Sirsky because they seems like they have different opinions. Fedorov was okay with continuous striking and striking but Sirsky seems like that okay we are striking them we're decreasing their possibilities and we need to move

forward we need to have an assault operation of course it's a question assault operation with whom how to do that where who's responsible planning and etc and blah blah you mentioned today Kursk and I remember that I fought against 76 assault division and I remember remembers that we destroyed like dozens of the BMDs in 352 vehicles dozens maybe more I don't know of the paratroopers

There were a lot of bodies and I said, oh, it's like it's quite huge for them But frankly all of us we know how Kursk ended. We lost approximately 1000 infantry fighting vehicles wraps tanks and etc of armor like Bradley striker and etc and it's not replaced we Lost a lot of people and right now this Air-Solid Wings that I mentioned, they are full-filled with manpower and infantry fighting vehicles with, as far as I remember, 93%.

But for example, Ukraine, 82nd Air-Solid Brigade, far from that. 95th, far from that. 80th Air-Solid Brigade, far from that. 76th Marine Brigade, far, far from that. Russia fulfilled the strategic kind of strategic reserves with manpower, with vehicles, with drones and etc. We just need to create two new brigades. Absolutely, two army corps I think. We have too much colonels. So this is an

interesting point of we think back to the strategy of the war, right, is how do we end the war on the best terms for Ukraine? And I think Fedorov's idea, maybe I'm gonna be a mis-explain this, but was to raise costs to inflict too many losses on Russia, which is unsustainable, whether they are not recruiting enough people to replace those losses, to not build new units, so on.

Also to try and cut off logistics for a middle strike, operational strike campaign to make it more difficult for them to fight, and strategically to raise costs, right, to make Crimea a liability, to, you know, go after the refineries, to go after the economy, and to make it to a point where Russia cannot, They cannot sustain the war and they need to end the war in some kind of terms.

Sierski is an offensive-minded general, which is probably what most generals are, most officers are. He obviously led the Hard Key Offensive, led the Kursk Offensive to successful operations. Some of the criticism directed to him is that first is assault units, assault regiment core that's been created. And I think they just reorganized it last week. come under a lot of criticism recently, Fedorov mentioned this as well,

but also it's the idea of when do you need to do assaults, when do you need to counterattack? Because there are times when their conditions are right, when you can counterattack, maybe Russians take a village, but they're very vulnerable, if you push them back right away, you can retake the territory. One of the issues the last couple of years, there are a lot of counterattacks done, where basically it was the default option.

If a commander acknowledges he loses a position, he's immediately told to counterattack, retake it. And usually when they lost position, It's like, well, we don't have enough infantry to hold this position. And so we don't have, definitely none of the guys to retake it. And that led to a bunch of issues in the military, including lying, where basically commanders would, I'm not gonna acknowledge a lost position because either I'll get fired

or I'll be told to retake it. And I know we can't do it. And then either I have to refuse that order, in which case I'll be fired, or just I can't execute this basically. This has been an issue that people have mentioned before, that there's this kind of bias towards counter-attacks. Sometimes when it's not, the conditions are not there. And there is, some of this criticism has been mentioned most specifically to Skala.

So Ukraine set up a number of assault regiments. These were mostly volunteer units that became assault battalions in 2024. Some of them led the operation in Kursk. So 225th was there, Skala, 33rd, a few other ones. This became a kind of real point of focus for Sierski. It's kind of his own force that he created himself. They are a huge priority for new soldiers. So new mobile soldiers, these regiments get, you know,

more soldiers per month than some army corps get. They are a huge priority for vehicles, for Bravleys, Abrams, you know, all that kind of equipment. His theory is that, you know, most brigades are under man. Most of them cannot do assault actions. Let's focus, you know, resources into making some that can do this or some that can like, you know, plug gaps in the frontline. But the reputations are very different.

And so each regiment is very different. It all depends on the kind of commander, what kind of standard he set. In particular, so Fedorov, he mentioned two, which I'll talk about. So he mentioned Skala. Skala has, in many areas, not a great reputation in the Ukrainian military. Again, it always depends on who you talk to. Partially because the idea that they do assaults too often, a lot of the assaults are unsuccessful.

They don't necessarily set conditions for success in some cases, or at least that's the kind of reputation. There's been some recent investigations to them about how many of the soldiers that have been mobilized who have died non-combat deaths in training. There's allegations that soldiers are kind of beaten or are kind of abused in training and so a variety of kind of issues.

The flip side I would say is that Scala, where they go, they hold the front line. They do plug gaps. They have had success in some offensive operations and there is some point I would say in assault units where, you know, it's, these are not going to be friendly places, right? You need units sometimes that have to breach, that have to be ready to take losses. And sometimes that leads to certain kinds of cultures that are not what we think

would be good cultures on the civilian side, right? Um, in terms of discipline and other things. But I think there's, there's different views of that unit. Then you have to say Code 9.2, you have First Salt Regiment. Code 9.2, Fedorov mentioned, it's kind of, when he talks about general assault concept, this is the unit he's talking about. And so they played a big role in the Kopianska operation last year. Very small number of infantry.

I think we mentioned before on some podcasts, but less than 100 infantry did this operation, went very heavy into use of drones, and basically created localized superior-oriented drones, which set conditions for moving forward. And the attrition ratio was very, very favorable. And so even though you're doing offensive operation, even though you typically see a

lot of losses, they had a very good attrition ratio in this operation and became this kind a standard that Fedorov wanted to apply elsewhere. Like this is a doctrine we want to kind of establish. And so you have again, this kind of mixed area there, but part of the question comes back to, right, for this war, does Ukraine need to focus on another offensive or does Ukraine need to focus on just making the war unsustainable for Russia?

Because if you do another offensive, maybe you take back territory, but you also have risks, right? Do you have enough manpower to do this? And what if you have a failed offensive where you lose a lot of guys? What does that lead to immobilization, and so on?

I'm for Sersky on this. Like, look, I don't agree with that man on much. Because like, I mean, just past place I've been where he was the one in charge, Bachmuth. But I think now, one could argue that there is a much better chance at doing offensive maneuver warfare than there was in 2023. Drones have shaped this war to the point where you no longer have second line infantry. You know, your second line is now the first part of your drone line.

So your DJI, bomber drones, whatever small ISR type, sometimes FPV-2.

Sorry for interrupting, I think it's like this drone line and the first line, it's all one line.

Yeah, but you know, you have your infantry at zero, then you have your DJI, whatever small ISR, and then you know, behind that you'll have your FPV teams. and on the Ukraine side bomber teams. But I think one could argue now that once you get past that zero line, if you get within the enemy's drone line, you can basically do whatever you want as an assault unit because the only thing holding both sides right now are drones.

If you get within the other side's drone line and you start clearing each drone position, they can't launch drones at you. Your ground stations are typically directional. So for them to actually be able to hit you with drones, they're gonna have to rotate their stuff, or they're gonna have to say, screw it, go back to goggles. So I think Sersky is right that there's opportunities for assaults.

I don't think me and him are gonna be on the same wavelength or same how to get to that point. I don't think Ukraine has found a medium on, this is what we need to do to shape the battlefield, this is how we deny it. Because the biggest thing right now is, if we smack every enemy drone team, if we destroy their logistics, or let me rephrase that, if we keep degrading and destroying their logistics at 100 kilometers deep,

going back to what you first said, we're not seeing this at the zero line yet, yes, you're not gonna see that for months, number one, but number two, we can hit vehicles all day long, they'll just truck them in by human, on foot, or they'll use ATVs, dirt bikes, whatever. So like the biggest thing we should be doing is area denial. Like my personal thought process is every tree line that's 15 to 20 kilometers deep, mine the shit out of it.

Not like 10, 20, 30, like a thousand mines. Like at 15 kilometers deep, if my front line's here and I know there's a tree line here, I'm gonna put a thousand land mines in that tree line. Simply because drone teams are logistics intensive. You know, if you need to bring 20 drones in every three days, You have 20 drones, 20 batteries, 20 munitions. Like it's not like one person can resupply a drone team. Takes three to four.

And then if you use all the drones, you gotta get it again. Nobody's walking through open fields. They're using tree lines. My every tree line shaped the battlefield properly.

You mentioned definitely a lot of things.

I've been wanting to do assault like, 2026 you could see a clear definition on where there's opportunity to exploit is just getting to that stage to where we can move forward. I'm pretty sure we went over all the same things in the first podcast.

Yeah, I mean, how to bring maneuver back requires huge report.

Yeah.

And it might be a couple of series of podcasts. But you mentioned a couple of things I would like to add.

Only thing I agree with Sirsky on, by the way.

Short remarks.

Yeah, but I mean, it's a good thing because, okay, we strike an operation that's fine, great, what's next? That's what I mean, we gotta shape, you gotta do something with it. you need to use this opportunity because they will adapt, they will jam, they intercept and then they are doing awesome. I think there's a short window that we can take it like yes I think by February March of

2027 what we're doing now obviously is not gonna work it's gonna get harder it's gonna get more difficult so we do have like Sursky's right we have a short window we got to do something if we're gonna do it if we're not gonna do it that's fine plan out the next six to twelve months and let's get that strategy moving if we're gonna do something let's do it preferably not in Zaporizhzhia

Yeah, Rob, you mentioned, and okay, you mentioned Bakhmut and you mentioned a big amount of lie. Well, it's definitely from both sides, but if you talk about Ukrainian one, I'm sure, 100% sure that it's this kind of lie started when Bakhmut campaign wasn't going. And it's not because of Serbski, to be honest. It most... It became a very political issue. And after that somehow Ukrainians

started being very vulnerable to this and sensitive to this news that we are losing some village Pordyayevka with five residents who live there. Frankly speaking, since the beginning of the war, I told myself, okay dude, I don't care about this village, this city, or whatever or anything. I'm thinking about this from the perspective whether it's suitable for

the defense, whether we have heels or etc or not. I want to, as I said today, secure. I want to have the possibility where my maneuver brigades are capable of advancing and defending, not to die on regular basis in attempts to take some position. Okay, we're losing the line. Fine, but you need to to secure the army, secure your people. They need to stay alive. Well, it sounds maybe

funny during the war, but as long as possible to be able to do something in the future. You don't need to retake every position you lost or every village or city. But Ukrainians became so sensitive with this question. And it wasn't like that because during summer 22, we kind of lost almost almost lost Luhansk area and no one was crying in social media. it was like and we lost it and the thing is that you mentioned drone assault units like

to know mention that the first time that we said something like that was 2023 when Sofarevsky created this concept and frankly speaking back then for me it was more like really drone assault unit rather than we have right now with code point 9.2 or some other units because if you kill most of your enemy with drones this means that you have drone assault unit and then you're assault. I don't think so. You just kill

as much as possible with drones and then your infantry going and clearing the trenches or whatever but the question is does it means that you have drone assault unit?

No I don't think so. Yeah I think there's a big difference so I was part of the Sukarevsky thing in 2023. A lot of our Chosen Company videos was part of that experiment as well. Like a lot of people think like they just used a bunch of drones hit the positions and then we assaulted. In reality like when we were moving forward there's always like one one DJI drone following every four guys

or every vehicle. So if we had three vehicles on a mission we had three DJI's following. Once you get out of the vehicle the DJI follows that team and And then we also had FPVs or other DJI's to drop grenades. We would plan out literally what position to hit, how to hit it with the drone teams. And so we planned everything extremely drone heavy. It looked like we did a lot of the work. We shot a lot of people.

Actually prepping the area and everything was, it was all drones. Our call for fires, we used drone FPVs for that. We use FPVs for everything. Like DJI drones for dropping grenades. I think drone assaults in 2023, what we were doing, is way more advanced than what you currently see, to be honest. I've been hoping somebody, Sucreski needs to go somewhere and just like sit down, code

9.2 or whoever and say, hey look, here's how we did it, adjust it to modern drones and then go for it. Because there's been like a huge thing lacking on it.

So there's, again, drone assault is still, it's just you're doing offensive operations, you're incorporating drones. And so you bring in drones, you figure out how can drones augment what we already have, how can they enable certain things. Because again, there's been this, and I agree with you, I think the prospects for offensive operations are better now than they were before. I think the middle strike campaign,

the ability to isolate parts of the front line is far approved, far better than it was a year ago. And so before, if you try and concentrate in one direction, you can do this. There's possibilities for success. We saw them in the Huyapoya direction and elsewhere. But if you can isolate an objective for logistics, make it difficult for resupply, make it difficult for reinforcements, then you can achieve more. You can actually achieve more.

And I went back in February. I met a bunch of units that did the Little Offensive Operation northeast of Huyapoya. And so I talked to a bunch of units there. and actually, Scala is actually a decent example. So they achieved a small breach where they got to Turnova and it was maybe 70 kilometers past the front line. I forget the number, every unit because of gray zone will sometimes give you pretty inflated numbers,

like oh we breached 20 kilometers, like well, the Russians didn't really hold all of that area, but okay. But what they did, they did achieve a breach, they achieved it with ATVs, Live Views, also BMPs, and they got into Turnova, they reached where FPV teams were. And they were getting the firefights with these teams. The problem was that there was no one to exploit it. And so they achieved the breach.

If they could have pulled the brigades near them and said, okay, follow it behind them and just exploit this, just keep driving, create chaos by the Russian lines, it was absolutely possible. And the Russian Telegram channels were absolutely just like, I'm not gonna use a bad word like you, but they were actually very, very concerned about what's going on. Because the Ukrainians really did have a chance

to have a localized collapse of frontline there. And that's why I also get my talk about Scala. There's a lot of negative things about them, about different treatment, other things. What I would say though is, if you need a unit to breach part of the frontline before you can exploit elsewhere, this is a unit that's willing to do it, right? They'll take casualties. You do need to have a unit that's willing to take casualties

to achieve a breach like this. And ultimately they're able to do this. And in that operation, what basically what happened is that they were able to locate all the Russian drone positions and they suppressed them with BM-21s, right? It was nothing complex. It was just okay. We know the tree lines where they're gonna be. As you said, if you spend time doing your proper reconnaissance, you try and mine the routes

so the FPV teams have fewer FPVs on position, fewer antennas, so on. They can't rotate off them. And then when you do the operation itself, you suppress artillery, you know, BM-21s, bomber drones, FPVs, whatever. Drones can enable offensive operations just as they're making difficult too. And so again, it's not just the problem, it's part of the solution. Russians identified this last year as well. I mean, Rubicon and their kind of developments,

there's part of this idea of we have to overcome Ukrainian drone teams with our own drone teams. It didn't ultimately succeed, but the concept behind it I think made sense. I also think we saw what happened, to be honest, we saw what happened with Huyapoya. Russian lines are not that strong. They are, as you said, there's the initial line infantry, but these infantry are not there to defend. They're there to keep moving forward.

So they're kind of like, it's got like a way point as they move forward, right? It's not like a dug in defense. It's not like the sectors of fire and that kind of stuff. Also, they don't really care about the infantry too much. So it's not like these guys are that high, well-trained, don't have much to weight AT weapons. It's really the assumption that Ukraine lacks the forces to do an offensive operation

and that Russia has enough Maviks, FPVs, Molnar to make anything too difficult. If you can suppress them, if you drive to them very quickly, five, seven clumps of the frontline, these guys could run away. And then there's nothing dedicated behind that, right? And so you can really create chaos. That's what we saw, I think, in Puyil-Puyil. And again, like I really do think that there was a missed opportunity in January, early February.

I think Ukraine could have really created a small collapse of the frontline, the Russians in that direction. But my view is this kind of command and control issue where every regiment was kind of doing their own thing. You needed someone right in charge of them. And right when you had this breach of one of the units, that commander should have grabbed a different brigade and said, okay, stop what you're doing. You follow behind these guys

and just keep exploiting and see where you can go. But it also comes back to, what was the objective of that operation? It's not clear to me there was a very clear objective. And so-

They probably didn't think they were gonna get that far, honestly. Like, I don't think anyone's planning to breach, you know, whatever, five, seven, eight kilometers deep. It's like, hey, let's get to, on the Ukrainian side, it's probably still, hey, let's get to the zero, re-grab it, then move whatever kilometer deep. I don't think anyone on the Ukrainian side is really saying, hey, let's plan for a tactical depth

maneuver 10 kilometers deep on the Russian side. We get to this area and then we halt. Like honestly, if they would have got seven kilometers in and nobody messed with them, they would have kept going probably. I mean, there's just no, they don't ever really clearly define their objectives on assaults.

Well, I do think we throw a third core. I do think third core is trying to take that salient back right now. I think that is one of the objectives we're seeing. There's not too much information out there, but there's been geo- located footage that shows the crane units have advanced in that direction. There's a salient north of Le Mans. And my view, based on just the open source information, they're trying to probably cut

off that salient, which I think makes entire sense to me. But again, it all comes back to what is the strategy? is your operational purpose? What is the intent all the way down? You have to know if it's nested where you're doing the task level, how does it fit in with the operation and strategic levels? And that all has to be clear. If it's not clear, then you have units doing different things and

they might be beneficial, but they're not necessarily working efficiently to one purpose.

Yeah, I mean, we can definitely continue discussing this, bringing back manure back, but I don't want to have this for our podcast because we agreed to discuss what Federer mentioned because as I said this topic requires a separate podcast and a couple of researchers because I can also add a lot of things but I maybe will try to moderate this right now. No you're good you're

good. All right one last thing quick I will say Scala is a perfect example of having extremely bad public affairs as well. Oh yeah. Like when I talk about like public affairs issues and like how to approach the public in Ukraine and how institutions and the military are not the best at it. Scholar is a perfect example. They don't ever get out in front of things when it's happening.

They wait or if they do get out in front of it it's always that's Russian propaganda. These guys are Traders let's create a let's create AI we does that we hold in the line Yeah, like I mean like scholars a perfect example of how not to operate a military unit for public affairs I don't know who's in charge of it, but like This is one of those things where find somebody like Fedorov that can run your public affairs

So you can get in front of the issues before it? You know blows up everywhere on social media Whether it's in the West social media Ukrainian Russian and then obviously fix your issues to so one other plan make them

So in the Marines, there's often quite a bit of variance between different Marine Infantry times. And it's not because the quality of the Marines is different, it's quality of just sometimes leadership or certain factors. I don't believe there's like bad units typically. I think again, Scala has tons of guys who are bravely fighting every day, holding the front line, that have done really tremendous work.

I think it's important when you talk about unit, you say, okay, they have some reputational issues on different times. It's important to keep in mind to like, Look, you have, Skylar has done a very important job holding Pekrov's direction for most of the winner. They've reinforced lots of parts of the front line. They do hold the front line. They're not running away. So I think there's also, you know, my view is never gonna be black and white.

I think there is some gray area here, but I do think again, it's important to keep in mind, these guys, a lot of them are doing great job fighting. They've done a tremendous job holding the front line. And by no means, we talk about some of these issues. Should we say that this is, you know, reflex proletariat?

No, yeah. Like, again, a lot of it's public affairs, though. Like, if they would approach the public affairs side of it better, you know, maybe the Ukrainians or whoever wouldn't be like, the unit's bad because, like, look, the unit's been around for a while. Are they a bad unit? No. Again, they're holding ground. They're taking ground. And, like, people should be aware, especially Ukrainian society, and this is probably something

that the general staff and the M.O.D. did a bad job on. You need to be aware, like, if you're an assault regiment 1231 01:13:48,260 --> 01:13:50,940 and your whole deal is to assault, your casualty ratio is going to be much higher than if you're defending a position, because the minute you step across the zero line, it's either go or get fucked up all the way back. So there's only two options, even in 2023.

And this is part of the issue, I think, also. It's not that the assault regiments are bad. No, it's just that- It depends how they're employed. If they're ordered, so example, if someone loses a village and they're ordered to do a counter attack the next day. If you don't spend time setting conditions for assault, it'll probably fail with the drone environment and so on. It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort to do this.

If you're ordered to do one the next day, it's probably not gonna succeed. Is it the unit's fault if they're ordered to do this? Not necessarily in my opinion. Again, my view is on most of these things, we talk about Federal, we talk about Sirski, everyone else, it's not a black and white issue. I think you have, you can say positive things in one direction, negative things in one direction,

but there's not a black and white on many of these things. I think there's always kind of good and bad things we get to say. And I always think that it's being in command of a war is incredibly difficult. I don't think it is an easy way of doing it. I saw my war at the platoon level, company level, which is much simpler than it is at the high level.

Very nice take that you mentioned that you saw the war from your perspective. I mean, being a company commander or as my, from my side being a surgeon, because I did much more than being a surgeon, but at the same time I realized because before the full-scale invasion I started war with pro-Russian separatists and of course I had more emotions and more critics but when I joined the army

I kind of understood that how foolish I was and this was usual happens for people joining the army they in years started understanding that it's not that simple as you can imagine and is definitely not black and white but as to scale I cannot be frankly speaking supportive of them but from my perspective I understand if you have regiments that consists of 10k which is the vision and you need to also understand the quality of personal who

served there it's also another thing that people do not discuss it's it's It's like more than a thousand drug addicts, former drug addicts and alcoholics. And it's only about some addictions, but there are other issues, let's say, in this way. And if people die during the training, if they really die during the training because of some different things, if you have like 10k, well, that's the reality.

And it's also a question whether you need to have this kind of regiment with 10k of personal pool because it's how to control everyone if they are spread all around the front line. I mean try to look at everyone and every battalion detachment commander whatever you call them and every nco company commander try to communicate with them it's literally not doable so the question is

was the freaking point of that? I mean you want to have these people who will be able to to retake something or breakthrough, fine, understandable. See no point of doing this if you have airborne, that assault units, because they're assault units and they did it before with armor, with all the NATO procedures. They just do not talk about this like, oh, we created a battle management, the battle captain, congrats. I mean, airborne did it

years ago because they've been trained by NATO countries. So the thing is that people really do not understand how the system works. Of course the system is in some cases horrible and people who are doing some things should be punished and go to the jail. Not just fired from them, you go to the jail. Need to be investigated. But also the question is if If you allow to build your army in this way, which is absolutely no back idea behind this,

it's question may be to those who, as you said, who deploy those troops in the way he deploys them.

It's also another issue where, and we can segue into the other discussion we want to get into. Mobilization is a big problem in Ukraine. It's been a big problem for a long time. has not gotten many volunteers since 2023. And when they get volunteers it's like for drone units or so on. People don't want to go into infantry. They don't want to go to assault units typically. The creation of assault units, part of this comes back to the issue

of mobilization, where you don't have enough willing people who want to be infantrymen to hold the front line. And so the way the LAASO regiments are resourced, they got a lot of prisoners. So initially they set up, you know, squall battalions. All the prisoner battalions have a different kind of code of conduct about even when the mechanized brigades right where it's like hey we are gonna leave these guys in a different way it's gonna be

more draconian but there's a certain kind of prison rule that of way we leave people right and so some of the stories you hear of of Scott other things these are stories I heard from squall battalions that were in mechanized brigades too yeah and so part of comes back to again, the assault regents are not getting 19-year-old motivated young guys. They're not getting what you had before the war. You're getting older people, they're

mobilized. No one wants to be an infantryman assault unit at this point in the war typically.

They're still foreigners. Yes, on the first assault. And then maybe not. But it comes back to how do you have guys who are motivated to go in a situation where there's a high likelihood of being killed or wounded and the way you maintain discipline it's sometimes uglier than it would be in an ideal situation and again the way the one thing I would say is you know my my perspective is from US military

so US Marines everyone I saw was a volunteer I went to Afghanistan everyone volunteered to go I did back to my deployments everyone volunteered to go again right so you did seven months on ship like okay and we knew we're going to go to to Marja that was the worst place in Afghanistan everyone volunteered to do this. All my guys were young we're all very very good

physical shape there's no you know drug issues and that kind of stuff so I went there on like ideal conditions leading mobilized military with older people who bring every type of issue from society you know from alcoholism from you know physical issues is entirely different and of And of course, we remember all the Vietnam stories. Vietnam is not known as a high point in like US military, you know, kind of command and control, right?

We had issues of fragging, we had all sorts of problems too. We just haven't dealt with that for 50 years. But we have experienced the same problems. And I think how you, you know, there's no perfect solution. And I think we should avoid kind of black and white, you know, approaches to some of these things because it's not easy, it's not simple. And I think it's difficult in general to kind of talk about always.

But all right.

They need to fix their public affairs. Optics is like 90% of it.

OK, but OK. Well, but all right. So the story this week as well, the commander of the 155th Mechanized Brigade, former commander, is the former chief of staff of Scala. He went over to 155th. 155th has kind of served under Scala the last six months. So that commander was arrested. Allegedly, he had seven or eight of his subordinates pick up two guys, kidnapped them, and executed them.

So this is another story. I mean from my point of view like look so If the commander did that and then seven or eight guys did that like where's the chain of command in between that like honestly? They should just dissolve the 155th at this point like it's been there's been issues since the start with it Take the good guys put them in a unit that can actually utilize them properly

They get treated properly get rid of all the shitheads lock them up whatever

Give them shovels.

Honestly, if a brigade commander or battalion commander was able to get seven or eight guys away from duty, okay, so these seven or eight guys, they're enlisted. Okay, where's their officer for their company commander? No, who's the battalion commander there, too? That's what I mean, though. There's been a leadership issue all the way down the totem pole here, and this isn't the first time with them.

So at this point, just get rid of the unit, move the guys into a unit that has proper command that already has a foundational level of command, and let them work there, succeed there. Because if a battalion commander, where's the other officers at that allowed seven or eight other guys to leave? Where's your company commanders? You just don't know that seven or eight guys...

Well, allegedly battalion commander was part of this.

I know, but that's what I mean though. Like how do you not let seven or eight guys travel four and a half hours, seven hours, whatever away and nobody knows?

That's one of the issues that Fedor mentioned. That we continue printing new units and we're not even capable of fulfilling them with manpower, with artillery shells, with drones, with officers, with NCOs, with literally no one. And I remember my latest brigade, that it was a new one, based on the former mechanized battalion. We didn't have a headquarter, to be honest, in general.

That's what I mean, like, just get rid of the 155th, take the officers, move them to other headquarters.

Yeah, that's clear, but...

There's positions for everyone.

Yeah, but there's the problem that we do not do this, we expand and expand, and right now we are creating two new unmanned system forces brigades.

And four mechanized.

Yeah, and we are taking people from already existing element system forces brigades to those two new ones and try to guess whether they are good one or bad one. So, and how they are supposed to lead the brigade. Okay, he is a lieutenant and he, I'm just right now talking about real guy, and he is really retarded. And he was sent from my former brigade to this new one and he has the responsibility He will be a chief of staff of a battalion

This is the most the organized guy I ever met to be honest

We have this okay, all right, let's go to the next We started we started using you know, some some knocker language too, so it's full bag. Okay

Sorry, all right. It's okay

You know, but anyway, it was a great episode glad to have you guys talk to you guys and we'll definitely do it again Perfect. Yeah, okay. All right. See you guys.

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