Link: https://youtu.be/2hJkprFnzhY

Duration: 173 min

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Short Summary

Lex Fridman hosts a long-form roundtable on the fifth year of the Russia-Ukraine war with military analysts including Michael Kofman (a Russia-focused military analyst, formerly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies), Michael Peck, and Preston Stewart, an American veteran who recounts first-hand combat and drone-assisted casualty evacuations in Ukraine. The panel argues 2026 marks an inflection point in Ukraine's favor, examines the dominance of drones and the "kill zone," and debates Russia's falsified battlefield maps, the Prigozhin mutiny and "Wagnerization," and whether a ceasefire could end the war without repeating Minsk. The conversation closes on why no one should declare a winner.

Key Quotes

1. "I'd say for FPVs, it's probably somewhere eight to 10,000 per day, just those, not including other types of tactical drones." (00:17:37)
2. "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."" (00:26:48)
3. "But the bottom line was Bakhmut Syndrome. It was essentially choosing to defend the city past the point when it made sense." (01:30:58)
4. "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" (01:38:03)
5. "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." (02:14:03)

Detailed Summary

Russia–Ukraine War, Year Five: Drones, Bakhmut, Wagner, and the Search for Peace

Episode Scope and Central Argument

Lex Fridman hosts a long-form military roundtable on the fifth year of the Russia–Ukraine war, combining strategic analysis with first-hand accounts from a veteran. The discussion covers the 2026 battlefield, the dominance of drones, the 2022 invasion, Bakhmut, the Prigozhin mutiny, battlefield information, and possible peace negotiations.

• Michael Kofman, a Russia-focused military analyst formerly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Center for the Study of Conflict, supplies much of the strategic and operational analysis.
• Michael Peck and veteran Preston Stewart contribute to the discussion of Wagner, Russian military culture, and combat in Ukraine, with Stewart recounting drone-assisted casualty evacuations he witnessed while serving with Ukrainian units.
• The panel organizes its analysis around four connected subjects: the current balance of power, drone warfare and infiltration, the political-military history from 2022 through Bakhmut and Wagner, and the prospects for a ceasefire.
• Its central conclusion is deliberately qualified: Ukraine’s battlefield position improved around late 2025, but neither Russia nor Ukraine can yet be said to be winning.

2026: An Inflection Point

The panel’s opening assessment is that the war changed materially around fall 2025, even though public perceptions often describe it as positional stalemate. Kofman argues that Ukraine has recently performed better on the ground than at any point since its failed summer 2023 offensive.

• Kofman dates the inflection point to roughly fall 2025 and calls 2026 Ukraine’s best year of ground combat performance since the summer 2023 offensive.
• Some recent Ukrainian operations gained more territory than the much larger summer 2023 campaign, which had run from approximately June to November 2023.
• Russia is having its worst combat year since winter 2023, with Kofman placing the onset of diminishing returns in summer 2025 rather than 2026.
• The battlefield is more fluid than it was in 2024 or 2025, with Ukraine operating two localized offensives despite the widespread perception of a static front.
• Russian manpower problems have pushed Moscow toward strategic bombardment, although Kofman argues that bombing has a poor historical record when a ground campaign is failing.

How the Front Evolved from 2022 Through 2025

The war passed through several distinct operational periods, including Russia’s failed winter 2023 campaign, Ukraine’s failed 2023 counteroffensive, and Russia’s renewed initiative beginning at Avdiivka. These campaigns set the conditions for the attritional front that later favored drones and zonal defense.

• Fall 2022 through winter 2023 was probably the worst period for the Russian military, as the invasion’s initial momentum dissipated and the Russian state struggled to convert political ambition into operational capacity.
• Russia’s winter 2023 offensive failed because its forces were not ready after a partial mobilization replenished some manpower and reserves, although the grinding battle for Bakhmut was the principal exception.
• Ukraine’s Western-trained and Western-equipped summer 2023 offensive also failed, gaining some ground but substantially less than expected.
• Russia recovered the initiative with a fall 2023 offensive that began at the Battle of Avdiivka and then sustained a broad grinding offensive through much of 2024 and 2025.
• The resulting battlefield favored defense, dispersion, mines, artillery, and drones rather than the concentrated maneuver envisioned before the war entered its prolonged attrition phase.

Russia’s Expanding Strategic Strike Campaign

Russia’s campaign against Ukrainian infrastructure began with combined missile strikes against energy systems and evolved into a broader daily air campaign. By 2026, the target set had expanded well beyond the power grid and heat infrastructure that dominated the first phase.

• Russia began its expansive strike campaign in earnest in fall 2022, combining long-range air-launched cruise missiles and short-range ballistic missiles against power plants, substations, and heating plants.
• By 2026, strikes had broadened to warehouses, data centers, schools, medical facilities, shopping malls, and trains, making the campaign an attack on Ukraine’s economic and social functioning rather than only its military.
• The emphasis shifted from relatively expensive cruise and ballistic missiles toward saturation attacks with large numbers of one-way attack drones.
• Those drones evolved from cheaper propeller-driven designs into jet-powered systems that function much like light ground-launched cruise missiles.
• Ukraine now faces both large combination strikes and daily pressure from jet-powered drones designed to trigger air alerts, disrupt economic life, and exhaust air-defense resources.

The Geography of the Front

The war remains concentrated in eastern and southeastern Ukraine, while the geography of the Donbas shapes the main Russian offensive effort. Ukraine is conducting local offensives in several sectors even as Russia presses against the remaining Donbas.

• Preston Stewart says the fighting remains predominantly in the east and southeast, while Kyiv is subjected to daily long-range missile and drone attacks without facing direct Russian infantry or short-range drone operations.
• Luhansk and Donetsk have absorbed the heaviest fighting, and the Donbas “Fortress Belt” has made Russian advances there exceptionally costly.
• Russian operations focus on the remaining Donbas, from Lyman south through the Sloviansk–Kramatorsk–Druzhkivka–Kostiantynivka cluster, with Dnipropetrovsk serving as the Ukrainian anchor farther west.
• Zaporizhzhia is dynamic in both directions: Russia is pushing west of Huliaipole, while Ukrainian tactical air-assault brigades are conducting a creeping offensive northeast of the city.
• Ukraine’s Third Corps conducted the successful “Vihod” offensive near Lyman, erasing Russian gains made there during 2025.
• Fighting also extends through Kherson toward the Black Sea, while Russian incursions into Sumy and Kharkiv seek a buffer zone in comparatively lower-intensity areas.

The Gray Zone and Ukraine’s Zonal Defense

Ukraine does not hold continuous, cohesive lines in the conventional sense. Instead, a layered defense creates a broad gray zone in which drones, mines, artillery, and small infantry pickets engage Russian forces before they reach prepared positions.

• Ukraine’s forward positions often amount to small pickets rather than continuous lines, producing an engagement zone that can extend roughly 15 kilometers forward and 15 kilometers behind the nominal front.
• Typical forward posts contain three infantrymen, are separated by several hundred meters, and amount to approximately three posts per kilometer, leaving numerous gaps between them.
• Ukraine’s zonal defense combines prepared positions, minefields, and drone units that attack approaching forces before they reach the line and pursue anyone who gets through.
• Many formations lack the manpower needed to counterattack a breakthrough, although some maintain quick-reaction forces that can address small infiltrations.
• Russia’s principal response is to infiltrate with individuals and light motorized groups, using motorcycles and ATVs to move behind Ukrainian positions and attack logistics rather than trying to break the front directly.

Drones, Artillery, and Minefields

The battlefield’s firepower system is a combination of means rather than a simple replacement of artillery by drones. Minefields and dispersed fire discipline compensate for Ukraine’s low troop density, while drones dominate many of the encounters inside the engagement zone.

• Cited statistics indicate that drones inflict roughly 80% of battlefield losses, but artillery and minefields remain essential to Ukraine’s ability to hold terrain.
• Minefields blunt mechanized assaults and light motorcycle or ATV attacks, while artillery forces attackers to disperse, slowing them and making them easier for drones to detect and destroy.
• Drones are less effective during periods of high wind and rain, particularly in spring and fall or winter, so artillery serves as an essential seasonal backup.
• Ukraine primarily uses NATO-standard 105mm and 155mm guns with an effective range of roughly 20 kilometers, but long-range drone threats have pushed artillery farther behind the front.
• Guns are dug in or kept mobile on tracks and wheels because overhead drones can detect them soon after they fire; much contemporary artillery is used for shaping rather than in traditional massed fire missions.
• Reconnaissance increasingly begins with relatively inexpensive fixed-wing drones that remain aloft, while both sides shifted from a few costly aircraft toward large fleets of low-cost, borderline attritable systems, in contrast to a U.S. Predator or Reaper costing more than $20 million.
• FPV drones are quadcopters roughly 12–18 inches across, sometimes as large as 20 inches, whose payload can be changed on the spot for anti-personnel, vehicle, or fortification targets; a published photograph even shows Kim Jong Un walking through a hallway stacked with FPVs.
• One side is estimated to employ 8,000–10,000 FPV drones per day, amounting to hundreds of thousands each month and giving strike capacity that substantially exceeds the personnel and equipment physically present on the front.

Autonomy and AI Are Over-Hyped

Despite the scale of drone employment, the war remains overwhelmingly human-operated. AI and autonomy exist in narrow technical forms, but they account for only a tiny portion of the fight.

• Nearly all systems in use—flying drones, one-way attack drones, and uncrewed ground vehicles—are remotely operated by people, leaving the conflict manpower-intensive rather than autonomous.
• A typical drone team requires two or three personnel, including a pilot, a co-pilot or navigator, and sometimes a technician who arms or services the aircraft while the operators watch a screen for long periods.
• Limited semi-autonomy is used for terminal guidance, pilot-designated target boxes, and terminal guidance designed to counter electronic warfare or jamming.
• These applications represent only a tiny percentage of the overall fight and total number of drones employed, making claims of autonomous drone warfare considerably more advanced than the battlefield evidence.

Viral Drone Footage and the Tank-Kill Myth

Publicly released combat video gives a distorted picture of drone effectiveness because it disproportionately shows successful attacks. The reality is less cinematic and often requires dozens of attempts to destroy a single armored vehicle.

• Released footage represents only a tiny fraction of actual combat and overwhelmingly shows successes, creating an anchoring effect in which observers assume nearly every launched drone hits its target.
• The belief that one $300 or $500 drone eliminates a tank does not match field experience, because drones can run out of battery, be jammed, or strike without detonating.
• Realistically, 10, 20, and sometimes more than 30 small drones are used against a tank, with the most extreme case Stewart witnessed during a July field trip requiring 12 drones.
• A heavily armored, electronic-warfare-protected Russian tank that “looks like a large barn” required 79 drones the previous year, while a typical tank may require 30–40 and an infantry fighting vehicle approximately 15–20.
• A mechanized company conducting a drone-enabled assault may expect to take nearly 300 hits, although most of its vehicles are expected to survive them.
• The panel also notes that video has become an essential evidentiary standard, even for events such as strikes on military airfields in Crimea that would once have been accepted without filmed proof.

Russian Infiltration and Light Motorized Assaults

Russia has adapted to Ukraine’s drone coverage by abandoning exposed large formations in favor of infiltration at the scale of individuals and small groups. This method deliberately trades casualties for penetration and creates difficult problems for overstretched Ukrainian units.

• Russia stopped using large formations that could be spotted 10–20 kilometers from the front and hunted by long-range drones, shifting instead to individuals released from checkpoints and sent forward 5–20 kilometers.
• An American volunteer Marine fighting with the First National Guard Corps in the Dobropillia direction described the approach as “chewing through terrain” while losing 90–95% of the troops, but said it works if Russia does not care about losing soldiers.
• The infiltration process is cumulative: of ten soldiers sent forward, seven may die while three identify a path between Ukrainian positions and guide the next group down the same gap.
• Three to five kilometers behind the front, infiltrators can encounter Ukrainian reconnaissance units flying Mavic drones that are not prepared to receive an enemy assault team.
• Russian mechanized attacks increasingly serve as a distraction that occupies Ukrainian drone attention, allowing soldiers on motorcycles, ATVs, and even cars such as Ladas to pass the first defensive positions and attack supply lines.
• Some light-motorized attacks involve more than 100 motorcycles using speed to cross the engagement zone, while a parallel mechanized attack may consist of only a few vehicles whose leading mine-clearing trawl can be isolated by Ukrainian drones.

The Kill Zone and Ukraine’s Offensive Method

The front has become a contest over control of the “kill zone,” the drone engagement area extending in front of the lines. The side that suppresses the other’s drones and logistics can create enough local superiority to move ground forces.

• In 2025, the war became a tug of war over who could operate more effectively in the kill zone, using drone strikes, traditional artillery, and, on the Russian side, heavy employment of glide bombs.
• Successful Ukrainian offensives begin by suppressing Russian drone units and interdicting the logistics behind them, effectively starving those units of replacement equipment and supplies.
• The next phase channels Russian forces toward known operational areas before a coordinated strike plan reduces losses and restores Ukrainian mobility.
• Striking a Russian drone unit can force its pilots slightly backward, creating space for more Russian soldiers to advance; this is one reason the front moves so slowly when Russian infiltration is extremely costly.
• Ukraine cannot sustain the casualty model used by Russia because it has fewer troops, and the panel argues that even with comparable manpower, the approach would remain a “question of culture.”

Ukrainian Drone-Assault Units and Restored Maneuver

Advanced Ukrainian formations are combining drones with better-equipped and adapted mechanized units to recover some of the maneuver lost during the war’s attritional phase. Their methods remain slower than the pre-2022 ideal but can be more precise and less costly.

• Formations such as “Code Nine Two” and the First Separate Assault Regiment often operate together, pairing drone support with adapted, well-equipped mechanized forces.
• This combination allows Ukrainian units to take terrain more quickly than through a conventional grinding offensive, restoring a degree of operational mobility.
• Ukrainian air-assault brigades use three-man fire teams supported by drones to advance from tree line to tree line, proceeding slowly but with relatively low casualties.
• These air-assault operations have made possible significant territorial gains in the South and Zaporizhzhia across a broad front during the current year.

Drone-Assisted Casualty Evacuations

Stewart’s first-hand accounts show that drones and uncrewed vehicles are changing how wounded soldiers are removed from the battlefield. The technical innovation is paired with human coordination and individual acts of courage.

• A SkyFall robotics system used a drone carrying a casket-like pod to evacuate a wounded soldier believed to be about 24 years old from roughly 30 kilometers behind the front because he could not walk out or be recovered by a ground robot.
• The rescue was conducted by CODE 9.2, described as one of Ukraine’s most innovative units, and the soldier appeared in the hospital the next day with his child on his lap.
• In another CODE 9.2 operation, a Russian drone disabled an uncrewed ground vehicle attempting to evacuate two wounded soldiers.
• The company commander then drove to the disabled vehicle in a pickup without body armor, loaded the two wounded men one at a time, and extracted all three under fire.
• A separate Cold Knight 2 incident involved one wounded soldier crawling into the evacuation container while another was already packed inside, with the crew maintaining communication throughout the flight back and telling the soldier he was doing well.
• Those missions required shaping, coordination, infantry, armor, and technical improvisation to recover a single wounded soldier.
• Stewart says exposure to war reveals the worst and best of humanity, sometimes in the same place and on the same day, with dark humor, mutual care, and refusal to abandon comrades helping people continue.

Fiber-Optic Drones and Counter-Detection

Fiber-optic drones address one of the central vulnerabilities of conventional FPV systems: their dependence on an interceptable radio link. The solution is physically cumbersome and operationally restrictive, but it is highly resistant to conventional jamming.

• Russia appears to have introduced fiber-optic drones relatively early, spooling a thin optical cable from the aircraft back to its operator so the signal remains inside the cable and electronic-warfare jamming no longer works.
• The cable limits payload and range and can snag on trees, roads, and other obstacles, requiring slower and more careful flight.
• Ukrainians initially experimented with fiber-optic systems without adopting them extensively, but after Ukraine’s Kursk offensive Russian units began using the technology heavily, found it effective, and spread the practice through additional formations.
• Fiber-optic drones have been observed operating at ranges near 50 kilometers but still account for no more than about 15% of tactical strike drones.
• Because they emit no interceptable radio signal, defenders may receive no warning of their approach.
• Ukrainian units commonly use a detection device nicknamed the Chuika, which has three antennas covering three frequency spectrums and displays an enemy drone’s video feed on a small Game Boy-like screen.
• Nearly everyone on the Ukrainian front carries such a detector, exploiting the fact that an analog drone’s signal becomes stronger near the receiver when it is closer to the receiver than to its operator.

Technology, Doctrine, and the Iteration Cycle

The pace of tactical innovation is unusually rapid because both sides know that an effective capability will soon be copied. Ukraine often generates the initial innovation, while Russia can scale and standardize a proven solution more effectively once it identifies one.

• Technology and tactics in this war iterate on roughly a three-to-four-month cycle, with each side anticipating that the other will imitate any capability that proves effective.
• Ukrainian units often behave like defense startups with their own research-and-development sections and drone-building operations, giving the country a strong bottom-up innovation advantage.
• Russian innovation is generally slower, but Russia has greater industrial capacity and scales and standardizes an identified solution faster, which frustrated Ukrainian commanders.
• Electronic-warfare systems proliferated so rapidly in 2023 and 2024 that the battlefield was described as an “electronic warfare jungle.”
• The war is a transition point in modern warfare, but it does not necessarily represent how every future conflict will look, partly because the absence of air superiority gives this battlefield a unique shape.
• Constant life-or-death competition has accelerated innovation enough for the war to appear to jump decades in military development, although earlier insurgencies such as the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and ISIS did not have comparable scale or access to modern industrial economies.
• Ukraine is practicing air denial rather than air superiority because neither side flies aircraft into enemy territory for much of the war, unlike U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan where airpower could operate overhead without being shot down.
• The Pentagon is running a “drone dominance” program to identify small, agile manufacturers, although responsibility for the effort remains divided—“everybody’s got a little piece of it.”
• New West Point courses on drones have not yet been created because the technology changed within roughly the previous 18 months, while creating a course and training cadets through it would take three to four years.

Lessons for American Military Planners

The panel treats the war as a transitional conflict rather than a complete template for future warfare. Its most important lessons concern uncertainty, force design, and the danger of extrapolating a late-stage battlefield into an entirely different war.

• The conflict began as a fairly traditional twentieth-century fight between two artillery armies, with most NATO-supplied equipment manufactured between the 1960s and 1990s and a 2022–2024 battlefield recognizable to people present in the 1970s and 1980s.
• Major questions remain about whether drones are near maturity, whether they will substantially reduce manpower requirements, and whether AI will eventually support autonomous navigation and guidance.
• Conventional wars move from an intense initial clash to a mined, positional phase where forces dig in, and drones came into their own mainly during that later stage.
• A common planning error is to treat the late-war phase as the likely opening condition of the next conflict, even though future wars may begin with a much more intense and maneuver-oriented phase.
• American advantages include tactical skill, investment in training and personnel quality, and a heavily funded expeditionary air component capable of supporting combined-arms maneuver.
• Russia’s difficulty at the beginning of the war is compared to the difference between running a business with 10 employees and operating a corporation of 20,000, illustrating its failure to scale complex operations.
• It is uncertain whether traditional American advantages retain the same value against an opponent already planning for drone-heavy warfare, invoking William Gibson’s line that “the future’s already here, it’s not evenly distributed.”

Why the 2022 Invasion Was Misread

Western analysts correctly recognized that Russia was preparing for war but misunderstood the assumptions on which the invasion plan rested. Kofman argues that the failure was not simply poor intelligence collection but an inability to connect Russian political beliefs with Russian concepts of operations.

• Kofman was among the analyst community in 2021 that believed Russia was preparing a full-scale invasion, although he was uncertain about its timing and precise shape.
• U.S. intelligence released information during the 2021 military buildup, but many officials, Germany, other European allies, and Ukraine’s political leadership refused to interpret it as preparation for full-scale war.
• They instead expected a narrowly focused Donbas breakout and assumed much of the buildup represented coercive diplomacy or a diversion.
• Kofman says analysts over-rationalized the operation by failing to connect Russia’s military concept of operations to its political assumptions.
• Those assumptions held that Russian intelligence had created conditions for a rapid takeover, Ukrainian troops would welcome the force as liberators, a coup de main could encircle Kyiv and isolate the political leadership, and the fighting would end quickly through surrender or isolation.
• Kofman says Putin did not view Ukraine as a genuinely independent country with a separate national identity and had not updated that position since 2014, a view he expressed in a July 2021 article.
• The hardest element to predict was the interaction between the two militaries, because Western analysts knew much less about Ukraine’s armed forces than Russia’s, while Ukrainian units performed better than expected and volunteers mobilized immediately.
• Military power cannot be reduced to a global ranking: a U.S.–China fight over Taiwan and a China–India war would produce different outcomes because geography, political objectives, and concepts of operations differ.
• Knowing two militaries is not the same as predicting how they will interact, which also depends on individual choices, serendipity, and chance; Western planners could have learned more about Ukraine’s forces before February 2022.
• People naturally assume that the timeline they experienced was the likeliest sequence of events and rarely consider that they may have lived through an unusually fortunate version of history.

Strategy, Tactics, and Operational Art

The panel distinguishes tactical actions from operational campaigns and military strategy, placing all three beneath political objectives. Its discussion emphasizes that strategy must remain connected to executable tactics rather than becoming a theoretical planning exercise.

• Tactical analysis covers battlefield details such as infantry advances, drone employment, and correlation of forces; operational analysis covers intelligence, logistics, fire support, and coordination among units.
• Military strategy links operations to political goals, while political leadership occupies the central level above all three military dimensions.
• The operational level remains contentious among military professionals, with some denying it as a distinct level while accepting the existence of operational art.
• Operations are phased and planned, coordinating multiple units around a clear objective with contingency branches and normally planned by army- or corps-level staffs rather than platoons or companies.
• Military strategy is essentially a theory of success, revealed most clearly in what leaders choose not to do and in the sequencing that connects operations to political objectives.
• A sound strategy rests on explicit planning assumptions and must be adjusted when those assumptions are disproven; strategy often fails when leaders keep executing it despite evidence that its foundations are wrong.
• Strategy is iterative because it interacts with the opponent’s strategy, while tactics change more quickly and must keep pace with new technology.
• If strategy is detached from tactics it becomes a well-written staff exercise the force cannot execute, while tactics without strategy amount to winning isolated battles without conducting a campaign.
• Fridman asks whether planners below the strategic level tend to assume success will proceed flawlessly, in the manner of the “Pinky and the Brain” cartoon, instead of preparing for contingencies that include complete failure.

Wagner, Prigozhin, and the Battle for Bakhmut

Bakhmut became a grinding siege centered on controlling roads, communications, and Ukrainian reinforcement routes. Wagner’s use of convicts and the regular Russian military’s fires were central to the battle, while the urban destruction made the city’s eventual capture strategically and materially costly.

• Wagner deployed in Syria, Africa, and parts of the Middle East before entering the war in early 2022, then operated alongside the Russian airborne and achieved an early success at Popasna in May 2022.
• The Russian government authorized Prigozhin to recruit from prisons, allowing him to form special assault formations staffed by convicts.
• Bakhmut can be periodized from approximately August 2022 through the fall and winter to May 2023, and in some respects was a classical siege involving both the city and the surrounding roads and logistical network.
• The medium-sized city contained industrial zones, nine-story Soviet apartment blocks, and a small river separating its eastern residential side from the more urban and industrial side; higher terrain lay east and west, forcing Russian forces to approach from the east.
• After Russia took Soledar, the smaller city immediately north of Bakhmut, the Ukrainian left flank began to give, followed by the right flank, while preventing encirclement became the central Ukrainian objective.
• Urban combat included BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles firing 30mm cannon directly in the city, tanks firing down streets into buildings, and close-quarters fighting from structure to structure, alongside drones and light bomber drones.
• FPV drones were still being experimented with during the winter 2023 phase, although Wagner repeatedly sent convict assault groups into Bakhmut to kill Ukrainian soldiers, exhaust their units, and deplete their ammunition.
• Russian airborne forces secured the flanks and provided artillery support, and the Russian fires advantage was what progressively leveled the city.
• By the time Russian forces captured Bakhmut, very little of it remained, meaning Russia gained control of a devastated city rather than a valuable intact urban and industrial center.

“Bakhmut Syndrome”

Kofman uses “Bakhmut Syndrome” for the tendency to defend or assault a politically symbolic city beyond the point where doing so is militarily rational. The battle became a fixing point because it followed Ukrainian successes and was entangled with expectations about Western support.

• After Ukraine’s successful fall 2022 offensives in Kharkiv and Kherson routed Russian forces and forced withdrawals from the western bank of the Dnipro, expectations arose that the war might be shorter and Ukraine might achieve military victory.
• Bakhmut became a fixing point during that critical moment, driven by sunk costs, political signaling, and the difficulty of withdrawing from a population center that anchored the defense.
• Kofman says the loss of Bakhmut was not as critical as popularly assumed: Russia needed about a year to advance to Chasiv Yar on higher ground and another year to take much of that town.
• Battles can become politically significant even when they are not tactically justified because wars are contests of political will, with Stalingrad cited as an analogy.
• Ukraine depended heavily on Western support and wanted to preserve the perception of momentum because further Western weapons, training, and capabilities might be tied to expectations of Ukrainian victory.
• The “Fortress Bakhmut” campaign implied that forces could not withdraw or conduct a timely retrograde, tying down numerous Ukrainian formations.
• Forcing Russia to commit experienced troops to Bakhmut also contributed to the June 2023 offensive being attempted by green, inexperienced formations equipped with better Western matériel against a difficult breaching mission.
• Russia became hyper-focused on Bakhmut, claimed ownership early, and exaggerated advances; comparable Ukrainian leadership criticism has appeared around Kursk and Avdiivka, with more expected around Kostiantynivka.
• Withdrawal becomes especially costly when the enemy has a favorable urban attrition ratio, communications are interdicted, personnel and equipment must be consumed merely to retain positions, or a counterattack is required to avoid surrendering ground.

Falsified Maps and the Meaning of Territorial Control

The discussion rejects maps and flag-raising videos as reliable measures of control. Effective control requires the ability to use the terrain, sustain forces, and deny the enemy dangerous fire opportunities.

• The best description of territorial control is the ability to use terrain for one’s own purposes by denying it to the enemy, maintaining a presence, and avoiding substantial enemy fire control.
• Full control of a town probably requires ground roughly 20-plus kilometers behind the front line, where forces can move relatively freely, although even those positions remain exposed to daily drone attack.
• Russian maps consistently place Russian forces 10–15 kilometers forward of where they actually are, often citing positions held by soldiers who have since been killed or withdrawn.
• Because Russia falsifies battlefield data, it organizes artillery and other fire support around lines it does not actually hold, and units rotating into an area can be sent into danger based on an incorrect forward boundary.
• Falsified information travels upward to political decision-making and possibly contributes to Putin’s belief that Russian forces continue to advance in the Donbas.
• Russian offensive operations tend to intensify in October and November, with casualties rising because commanders are pressured to physically capture territory they have claimed to control for months.
• Positions in Kostiantynivka are “marbled,” with hundreds of Russian troops in basements intermingled with hundreds of Ukrainian troops in the same city, making control difficult even for forces physically present.
• Russia has increasingly sent a single soldier forward to wave a flag for a drone to record and then declared everything behind that point controlled, although even a genuine flag video proves little if the soldier is in a basement and cannot be resupplied.
• A fake AI-generated video of a Russian advance circulated and was publicly called out by the Russians themselves, demonstrating that Moscow both manufactures and debunks such propaganda.
• During the battle for Kupiansk, Putin claimed Russia controlled the town and invited international journalists to verify the claim, but they did not go and Russian forces shifted airpower and fire support away from the area.
• Gerasimov told Putin that all Ukrainian units in Kupiansk were encircled, a claim contradicted by an observer west of the town with a Ukrainian brigade.
• Ukraine is obtaining a substantially better picture of current frontline conditions than Russia, although commanders on both sides want to report success and Ukrainian commanders have been dismissed for inaccurate reporting.

Command, Distortion, and “Garbage In, Garbage Out”

Information distortion is not unique to Russia, but Russian centralization and coercive culture amplify its effects. The panel contrasts that system with reporting failures in the Ukrainian military and with the universal tendency of armies to conceal bad news.

• The Russian military centralizes command so extensively that the senior officer holds more authority than the junior officer physically commanding the troops, and the senior determines the scheme of maneuver subordinates must execute.
• Distortion is especially severe in Russia because soldiers lack trust in commanders, the coercive culture strongly rewards lying to conceal mistakes, and centralization creates a “garbage in, garbage out” planning problem with little room for junior adaptation.
• Under the previous Ukrainian commander-in-chief Syrskyi, commanders could not withdraw without General Staff approval and were directed to retake lost positions without sufficient manpower.
• That created an ethical dilemma between reporting a loss honestly and preserving the men under their command, and several planning commanders were relieved.
• Distortion of information as it moves up a chain of command appears in the wars of Napoleon, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, and Genghis Khan, although its magnitude depends on military culture and which level of the chain is concealing the truth.

Political Leadership Owns War

The panel places responsibility for starting, prolonging, and terminating wars primarily with political leaders rather than military commanders. Assumptions about speed, cost, and political feasibility often shape campaigns more decisively than battlefield calculations.

• Political leaders commonly begin wars with clear assumptions and resist information that contradicts them; the expectation that a conflict will be sharp and short was a basic input into both the 2022 invasion and the U.S. war with Iran discussed during the episode.
• When military leaders warn that a task cannot be done, political leaders sometimes respond that the adviser is the “wrong person for the job,” as illustrated by the claim that if 300,000 troops were needed for Iraq, someone else could accomplish it with fewer.
• Afghanistan shows how the United States became trapped in a 20-year war through pride, reluctance to acknowledge that the task could not be done, and bad advice from superiors who set conditions the mission could not meet.
• Flooding the country with combat units improved physical security but undermined nation-building, as illustrated by efforts to make residents of Zhari District in Kandahar Province accept a Kabul official who did not speak their language and whom they had never seen.
• The panel recommends that the State Department and USAID fill non-military roles instead of allowing the military to claim “we got this” and improvise functions such as counterinsurgency and language training.
• In prolonged conventional wars, political leadership increasingly asks how many troops are needed to “kick the can down the road” so the war is not lost before the next election and becomes someone else’s responsibility.
• Military leaders rarely say explicitly “don’t do this,” but their advice carries clear implications about risk and cost, and commanders who have fought and lost soldiers are rarely eager to pursue war.
• In the U.S. system, military leaders advise the president as commander in chief on capabilities and options, although advising yes or no on going to war is described as a “very slippery slope.”
• The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is the senior-most U.S. military officer but does not command forces, unlike Ukraine and Russia, where the commander in chief or chief of the general staff exercises direct command authority.
• Zelenskyy has delegated military responsibilities to the professional military and avoids tactical and operational decision-making, which the panel views as generally sound; Putin appears more involved at the operational level but is generally removed from day-to-day military decisions.

The Prigozhin Mutiny

The June 23–24, 2023 mutiny exposed factional conflict within Russia’s military leadership and briefly raised the possibility that the war could be disrupted. The panel sees it less as a viable regime change than as an extraordinarily destructive act of bargaining.

• Yevgeny Prigozhin rose through outspoken criticism and his conflict with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, creating an apparent contest between a Ministry of Defense elite clan and a clan backing Wagner.
• Wagner looked down on the regular military as incompetent, while regular officers looked down on Wagner as hired mercenaries or convicts, and the two organizations competed for credit at Soledar and Bakhmut.
• Prigozhin used the leeway of his priority status to complain about inadequate artillery ammunition and promoted a conspiracy that the regular military had withdrawn fire support, using the dispute to build a popular following and political cachet.
• Shoigu then issued an ultimatum that after Bakhmut all Wagner personnel would have to sign military contracts, ending Wagner’s autonomy and forcing Prigozhin to choose between surrendering command and mutiny.
• Wagner had been withdrawn from Bakhmut and was resting and replenishing in Luhansk when the rebellion began.
• Some analysts interpreted the move not as regime change but as a petition: Prigozhin advanced on Rostov, headquarters of the Russian military’s war effort, and Wagner forces surrounded and occupied the city.
• Putin publicly condemned the mutiny as a betrayal during an active war while two Wagner columns advanced beyond Rostov toward Moscow, shot down Russian aircraft and helicopters, damaged the Russian Air Force, and killed significant personnel.
• Prigozhin insisted that the columns were not merely trucks and pickups but a mechanized force with tanks, air defense, and armored vehicles, and Moscow panicked because most Russian forces were committed in Ukraine.
• The panel doubts Wagner came close to overthrowing the government; after Prigozhin failed to find Shoigu and Gerasimov in Rostov and Putin ruled against him, the march on Moscow became bargaining leverage for a stand-down, amnesty, transfer of assets, and gradual absorption of Wagner.
• Prigozhin likely recognized early that the elite did not view him as an alternative to Putin, and most coups in personalist authoritarian regimes fail because intelligence identifies them before they can develop broader support.
• The rebellion became a rare, fully realized 24-hour mutiny that was unusually damaging; some observers thought it might have ended the war, and Fridman recalls 48–72 hours of genuine uncertainty.
• Prigozhin died on August 23, 2023, at age 62 when his private jet exploded over Russia’s Tver region while flying from Moscow to St. Petersburg, killing him and several senior Wagner commanders.
• The speaker interprets the crash as a deliberate demonstration killing, while Peck adds that other senior Wagner figures were unlikely to survive the aftermath.
• Prigozhin owned and operated the Internet Research Agency, Russia’s network of propaganda bots, and Wagner’s popularity created a problem because those bots did not know which side to support during the mutiny.
• Wagner’s status as a private military company outside the formal government provided deniability, even though it flew in on Ministry of Defense aircraft and trained at Ministry of Defense facilities.

Wagner’s Aftermath and “Wagnerization”

Wagner was destroyed as an independent organization, but its tactical model became more influential inside the regular Russian military than Wagner itself had been. The result was a broad adoption of specialized assault groups accompanied by growing limitations.

• Wagner went head-to-head with U.S. forces in Syria, likely in February 2018 outside Deir ez-Zor, and the encounter went badly for Wagner.
• After Wagner’s rise and suppression, Shoigu and Gerasimov dismantled the private military model and brought its functions back inside the state, with the Africa Corps now operating in Africa under some former Wagner leadership.
• “Wagnerization” describes the Russian military’s wholesale adoption of Wagner tactics after the organization itself was dismantled.
• This produced assault companies such as Shtorm-Z and Shtorm-V, as well as convict-staffed assault groups deployed across battalions and regular formations.
• In 2023 and 2024, many Russian assault units were staffed by convicts while others relied on special higher-paying contracts, and the airborne also developed assault groups and detachments.
• Prigozhin claimed Wagner killed 20,000 people at Bakhmut between roughly August 2022 and May 2023, but the Russian military lost far more convicts overall in the years that followed.
• Wagnerization produced some tactical success but overspecialized the force in small assault groups, causing diminishing returns and an eventual loss of capacity for larger, more complex operations.

Strategic Assessment of the War

The panel divides the conflict into an initial failed attempt to impose a new government and a prolonged conventional war defined by attrition, exhaustion, and unresolved political demands. Russia’s current battlefield weakness has not caused it to lower its maximal aims.

• The first 30 days, from February 24 to March 25, were an attempt to take over Ukraine and impose a new government; that attempt failed decisively and cannot now be recreated.
• Everything after that first month has been a prolonged conventional war shaped by attrition and exhaustion.
• Ukraine’s independence and national identity are no longer in question; the remaining war will determine the borders of the independent state, its economic sustainability, and whether it must make strategic concessions concerning NATO or the European Union.
• Russia lacks the military means to achieve Putin’s maximalist objectives, and its combat performance has worsened, with the tactical inflection point occurring during the summer and fall of 2025.
• Ukraine’s demands include a ceasefire along the line of control and the repatriation of lost people and stolen children, while Russia’s demands are outsized and appear tied to aspirational military performance it wishes it had achieved.
• Russia wants Ukraine to concede the remainder of the Donbas because it cannot take it; even the more limited goal of occupying the last twenty-plus percent of the Donbas is not something the panel believes Russia can achieve during this war.
• Because Putin has been unwilling to reduce his political aims, the war is likely to be judged a strategic failure for Russia with generational consequences, making it difficult to see him going down in history other than in ignominy.
• Russia’s maximalist territorial demands include all of the Donbas and as much of Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipropetrovsk as it can occupy, with operations spread across a front approximately 1,200 kilometers long.
• Russia advanced more in Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk the previous year because those areas contained less urban terrain and fewer of Ukraine’s better-equipped troops, while other forces remained focused on the Donbas.
• Russia also seeks limits on the size and capabilities of the Ukrainian armed forces, restrictions on Ukraine’s strategic orientation or NATO alignment, limits on Western forces being deployed or based in Ukraine, and concessions involving the Russian language, Russian Orthodox Church, and international recognition of occupied or annexed territory.
• Ukraine’s goals are more closely tied to what its military can accomplish: stabilizing the front, liberating territory, protecting critical infrastructure and air and missile defenses, and preventing the belief that Ukraine can be bombed into concessions.
• Ukraine’s third strategic element is exhausting Russia economically by targeting energy exports, refining capacity, and, more recently, data centers that affect government revenue.
• Sanctions have done less damage than expected because Russia found ways to bypass them, and widespread frustration over living standards has not materialized; the economy is under pressure, but how that affects the war’s end remains “a bit of a black box.”
• Russia has a decisive manpower advantage but is taking ground with soldiers rather than robots or drones, and recruitment shortfalls in some regions have produced a “shadow mobilization” involving increased coercion.
• Putin claimed that Zelenskyy lacked authority to discuss the future of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk because they were historic Russian lands, treating territorial concessions as a foregone conclusion rather than a negotiable issue.
• Russia would also have to cross the Dnieper to take Kherson City and the rest of the oblast, and no serious assessment places it close to crossing that river, let alone overcoming the remaining terrain in Luhansk and Donetsk.
• Wars end, the panel argues, when both sides judge negotiations and settlement to be a better alternative than the results they expect to gain by continuing to fight.

Diplomacy and the Loss of American Leverage

The discussion criticizes both the absence of an earlier Western peace plan and the subsequent American shift from coalition leadership to neutral arbitration. The proposed alternative is a phased, limited ceasefire rather than an agreement that attempts to settle every issue immediately.

• The Anchorage, Alaska meeting appeared to begin bringing Russia out of the isolation imposed by the United States and its Western allies, although the United States later returned to trying to compel Ukraine.
• Its one positive effect was pushing all parties to clarify their requirements, even if the process occurred for the wrong reasons.
• The Biden administration had no settled strategy—“As long as it takes is a slogan, not a plan”—while European allies had years to develop a peace process but instead concentrated on supporting Ukraine and sustaining the war.
• Because the war is fought principally in Europe, European allies did not take the lead for years and were forced into catch-up mode when the Trump administration appeared.
• The panel judges the Trump administration’s approach poorly because it has not consulted key allies properly and has been capricious and unpredictable toward both Ukraine and European partners.
• Parts of that administration reportedly want to normalize relations and do business with Russia, viewing the war as an obstacle, while negotiations have repeatedly proceeded as “let’s make a deal” without testing whether a deal is coherent or durable.
• The result may be only “a piece of paper with the word ceasefire on it” rather than a mechanism capable of producing lasting peace.
• Decisions should also be assessed through an American lens; Ukraine’s offer to help with interceptors during the U.S. war with Iran opened scope for collaboration, joint production, and facilities in exchange for development rights, without requiring Ukraine to send money or equipment.
• The United States left leverage unused and moved from leading a supporting coalition to acting as a neutral referee, sacrificing influence over European allies and Ukraine.
• Ukraine feared that placing it on equal footing with Russia amounted to selling it out, while European allies no longer trusted U.S. intentions and Russia was said to laugh at the idea that the United States was neutral.
• A possible route is a partial, compartmentalized ceasefire beginning with an end to strikes on critical infrastructure and perhaps Black Sea attacks, followed by a ceasefire lasting days, a week, two weeks, or a month to demonstrate genuine political engagement.
• Russia is not presently willing to do this because it insists all complex issues must be settled before a ceasefire, while fighting remains its preferred alternative.
• Putin is likely waiting for two developments: the outcome of the winter strike campaign, which could weaken Ukraine’s bargaining position, and spring European elections such as France’s.
• Ukraine currently holds considerable leverage because it has performed much better than Russia on the front and Russia has no good prospects for advancing along most of the line.
• Winter is hardest not for front-line troops but for civilians, because the country’s economy, cities, and population are what the war is ultimately being fought over.
• Russia retains the resources and will to continue into 2027, and so does Ukraine; European allies are likely to provide additional funding, while the United States has threatened to suspend support without yet cutting off what Ukraine depends upon.

Minsk, Imperial Rivalry, and the Human Meaning of War

The warning that a ceasefire could become another rearmament period is grounded in the failures of Minsk I and Minsk II. More broadly, the panel frames Russia’s war as an imperial project sustained by political assumptions and popular acquiescence rather than by one man’s personal orders.

• Ukraine would be highly vulnerable six to eight months into a ceasefire without enforceable security guarantees because it would need to demobilize front-line troops, while Russia’s largely contracted force might not demobilize at all.
• Ceasefires can therefore become rearmament periods that lead back to war, and the 2014 Minsk I and Minsk II agreements both failed to produce a political settlement.
• Comparable cycles of renewed conflict include the India-Pakistan conflicts, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the Armenia-Azerbaijan wars, and Russia used earlier ceasefire periods to rearm before resuming the war.
• The Russian war is not solely Putin’s: some part of the population supports or acquiesces in it, hundreds of thousands of Russian men sign contracts to fight, and this is the first large-scale conventional Russian war in which very few men were mobilized.
• The conflict is framed as a “failed imperial transition” and a “Soviet succession,” making it an imperialistic war fought by an elite unable to imagine another vision for Russia.
• Russia remains a revisionist, revanchist, imperial state in Europe regardless of its formal political system, because European imperial powers historically did not surrender their empires easily.
• Asked what William Sherman’s “war is hell” means, the guest describes it as a sickness that cannot be kicked away, with humans continuing to resolve disputes through killing and war revealing both the best and worst of human nature.

Why No One Should Declare a Winner

The panel rejects “winner” as a useful description because Russia and Ukraine are pursuing different objectives and because declaring a winner creates false expectations. The military balance may be moving in Ukraine’s favor without guaranteeing a decisive outcome.

• The guests decline to score the war like a football game because Russia seeks territorial and political domination while Ukraine primarily seeks to preserve its sovereignty and independence.
• Ukraine has lost territory that it does not appear close to retaking, which is not winning in any ordinary sense.
• At the same time, Ukraine still exists, retains its sovereignty, and has avoided the collapse that early observers repeatedly predicted.
• Historical examples show how quickly momentum can reverse: Nazi Germany appeared to be winning for much of World War II, and Imperial Japan looked nearly unstoppable in the Pacific before sudden reversals.
• Declaring one side “winning” creates an audience expectation that the side will ultimately prevail, so the analysts believe they should avoid the term.
• Even in a conventional war, it is very difficult to see more than a couple of months ahead because so many outcomes remain contingent on weather, political decisions, and chance.
• The Prigozhin march on Moscow was cited as an event that might not have toppled Russia but could have prevented it from projecting power into Ukraine.
• The central unresolved debate is whether Ukraine’s current battlefield advantage is a durable secular trend or only a temporary window, particularly because Russia’s advantage in 2024 and 2025 also failed to last.
• The winter strike campaign remains a major unknown, and the panel notes that the U.S. war with Iran and other de facto external actors could materially and politically affect the Russia–Ukraine war.

Unresolved Strategic Questions

The discussion ends without resolving whether the current combination of Ukrainian momentum, drone warfare, and diplomatic pressure can produce a durable settlement. Several technical and strategic uncertainties remain at the center of the assessment.

• The largest technical questions are whether drones are approaching maturity, whether they can substantially reduce the manpower required to win battles, and whether autonomous navigation and guidance will become operationally significant.
• The largest operational question is whether Ukraine’s 2026 advantage reflects a lasting change in relative military power or a temporary opening created by Russia’s manpower and command failures.
• The largest diplomatic question is whether a limited ceasefire can be sequenced in a way that permits genuine political engagement without giving Russia another Minsk-style rearmament window.
• Even if the battlefield remains fluid, the panel remains cautious about predicting even a couple of months ahead, with the winter strike campaign, European elections, external conflicts, and political decisions all capable of altering the trajectory.