Putin loses battlefield nuclear capability as troops become too degraded in Ukraine | George Barros

Putin loses battlefield nuclear capability as troops become too degraded in Ukraine | George Barros

in the case of maneuver Warfare um you know that requires a highly trained force it also requires a highly ready Force for there to be a mushroom cloud in the enemy line there’s now a gap and then for uh say a battalion Commander or company Commander to to point to his men and say all right guys we’re suiting up into our radioactive protective suits we’re getting into the radioactive protective vehicles and then we’re driving uh into the mushroom cloud to go ahead and exploit that I think the Russian military of early 2022 before the officer Corps uh the modern vehicles and the professional prepared Force had been eviscerated they were prepared to do those sort of tasks they had been trained on how to do it they in principle knew how to do it but that’s not the Russian military today um it’s full of volunteers and irregular forces the elite units have all been ground out reconstituted multiple times the Russians are pulling vehicles from long-term storage and moth balls that I’m confident have not been all recertified to be able to safely operate in a radiated contaminated Battlefield and so the Russians very well might try to drop the bomb uh to create that hole but the whole point of that is a facilitate maneuver and the Russians simply can’t do the maneuver phase hello and welcome to Frontline for times radio I’m James Hansen and today we’re talking about the latest on the war in Ukraine and I’m delighted to be joined by George baros George is from The Institute for the study of War he’s a regular guest here on front line and he’s the head of their Russia team George welcome back thanks so much pleasure having me James a pleasure to see you as always to begin with can you just give me your assessment on on what the situation on the ground is in Ukraine at the moment sure um well since the last time we spoke and not a tremendous amount has changed the Russians still have the theater initiative meaning they can control the timing location place and intensity of their offensive operations over the last month the Russians have made an increased scale of tactical gains in the East particularly in denz Gold blast um west of a diva which fell back in February the Russians have managed to advance a little above uh five six kilometers or so they’ve captured a handful of small tactical villages in the area and um they’ve also made some advances uh to the west of bmot um they’ve been capturing some Villages uh there as well and advancing towards uh a town called chass varar um I’m not particularly concerned about the Russian gains at this time to be frank uh I think there’s a whole lot of uh negativity and low morale that’s spreading because of these territorial losses but in the grand schema thing they’re really not that small um most of these Villages were captured in the course of April and between April 1st and May 1st uh the Russians only gained a grand total of about 75 square kilometers or a little bit above the size of Manhattan and they’ve not been any kind of operationally significant gains that threaten to fundamentally unhinge uh Ukraine’s ability to defend the rest of the province uh theet go blast what I will say is it seems that the Russians are in fact Expediting and intensifying their offensive operations at this time specifically in order to capitalize on this increasingly shrinking window of opportunity before uh the American provided Aid actually reaches the front lines and stabilizes it of course the bill was passed a couple weeks ago um but it’s going to take a couple more weeks for uh the ammunition and the aid to actually re the reach the front lines at scale so we’re now entering in your view a really crucial window where if Russia is going to launch a new ground defensive it’s going to come very soon yeah you know the the chief of the general staff of valer gasimov his whole modus H arendi is to try to exploit these windows of opportunity uh and that includes uh conducting and committing to offensive operations and attacks before the Russians have had adequate time and resourcing to fully prepare for them um because for the Russians they understand that sometimes the conditions on the battlefield uh and the tempo uh sometimes s dictate uh when is the best time for you to actually make your move not your ability to optimally prepare and get up to that desired strength that you need to be to do what you have to do and what do you think that Russian ground offensive may look like I know the isw has pointed out that Russia seems to be amassing quite a significant force in the k o blast is that with a view to looking at Northeastern Ukraine and the area around hariv sure um well I want to make a point of differentiation there already is a major Rush on offensive ongoing now um ever since the the end of March 2024 we’ve seen the Russians actually intensify the tempo of their fighting and operations the previous sort of lowest common denominator for previous Russian assaults were these meat assaults unman U dismounted infantry without vehicle support trying to make these you know very tactical gains crossing fields but increasingly we’ve seen the Russians you know like I said since late March conducting these platoon sized and Company sized uh frontal assaults with vehicle support so with some tanks with more mechanized equipment and that was a that was a notable inflection that and that trend has continued we’re also forecasting the potential for a new major Uh Russian offensive effort which is separate from the ongoing offensive effort in in denet like you said which would could be possibly targeting Northeast Ukraine um we’ve collected a variety of indicators uh that indicate that the Russians have been redeploying significant forces to um that South uh Southwestern corner of Russia Northeastern Ukraine in k Blas and uh bans go blast and in belgaro oblast and approximately the Russians have about 50,000 forces there according to open source um uh Ukrainian estimates um we’re very concerned about the possibility that either in late May or early June uh the Russians may decide to commit to some form of an offensive effort uh aimed at harke oblast or potentially aimed at seizing harke City we assess that the Russians will fail in any attempt to seize Haru City they simply don’t have the strength and the manpower to do this they attempted it previously back in February and March 2022 back when the Russian military was in a much stronger position and they they failed then so they’re less likely to do so now but that that’s not the point um we’re concerned that the Russian general staff they have a a campaign design that’s deliberately intended to try to fix Ukrainian forces across the theater and if you look at the map of the battlefield right now um you know the main offensive effort for the Russians clearly is the n sco Bloss that’s where they’re sending most of their forces and if the Russians open up a new front in the Northeast against har that will naturally Force the ukrainians to make some difficult uh political and Military decisions about what kind of resources do they redeploy from the East to focus on defending har um and that could unfortunately stretch the ukrainians thin and potentially facilitate larger Russian uh facilitate the likelihood of a larger Russian breakthrough um in the East and denet and we think that that is uh the the thing that we’re really concerned about in this potential Russian attack in the Northeast and that issue of resources of course brings us onto the key question of how long it’ll be until this latest batch of US military aid actually is the impact of it has actually felt on the front line I know you mentioned a moment ago George you think it will be a couple of weeks at least but I mean how long is a couple of weeks is that literally two weeks time could it be longer than that and and when will we actually see a difference on the front line yeah um the logistics question is is difficult for me to to answer with a high level confidence because I I I don’t have any access to classified Logistics information but we know that they’ve not appeared yet and um all the American Senior official reporting as well as what Ukrainian officials have volunteered indicates that it’ll probably take a few more weeks I don’t know what the exact number is until the aid reaches the front lines at scale um we might start seeing you know equipment starting to trickle in in in the coming uh maybe fortnite or so but really to get to get the coming at scale is going to take a while and so there is this window of opportunity where the Russians can try to make whatever gains that they can uh now of course one of the big questions with this new Aid is how it’s actually going to be used by Ukraine what did you make of of David camaron the UK foreign secretary’s comments last week that Britain is now prepared for Ukraine to use British supplied weapons against Russian Targets in Russia I think that’s a wonderful active leader ship uh by the UK government um and and really it’s a it’s a part of a larger trend of where the UK has been in fact uh leading the charge and supporting Ukraine and helping uh the West the rest of the West be it Germany sometimes or be it the United States and others to actually take the steps that are necessary for the ukrainians to actually be Victorious and defeat the Russian invasion of Ukraine um unfortunately German and particularly American policy has created a def facto Sanctuary I call it Putin safe space um this is the airspace and the territory uh in the Border regions of Russia in the immediate vicinity of Ukraine that are indeed strikable they are within the range of Western provided Ukrainian weapons but that the ukrainians actually cannot strike because there’s a moratorium on striking those territories and what this sanctuary in safe space functions as is as a massive shield for which in which the Russians uh can place and forward deploy logistic equipment they can uh fly aircraft in um they can have their you know rear re area support uh you know combat support and server support elements and they use all that to optimize the it’s the long shaft of the spear that they use to thrust the tip into Ukraine um and the ukrainians should interdict it and they should degrade it because it will reduce the Russians ability to project Force into Ukraine uh if they can strike that um I’d like to also talk about the airspace aspect you know the Russian have been uh conducting intensified Glide bomb attacks against har city um since the beginning of this year um by nature of uh geography you know har is damned to uh not be able to defend itself uh should this safe space and Sanctuary continue indefinitely the range of the Russian Glide bombs is 40 to 60 kilometers harive is 40 kilometers from the international border that means that Russian aircraft can drop an infinite number of Glide bombs uh and against har City if uh American Patriots are not able to actually interdict and strike those Russian aircraft while they’re still in Russian airspace so um I really do hope that we reevaluate uh this policy and the UK taking this this charge on this like how it previously has what sending Challenger tanks to force the Germans and Americans hand and also uh with the Storm Shadow uh missiles for long- range fires very necessary step and uh I see it as a positive development I wanted to ask you about Russia’s use of of Glide bombs to Target hariv because there have been reports over recent days that Russia accidentally bombed belgrad because a Russian jet carrying Glide bombs that were going towards hariv mistakenly dropped Munitions on its own territory now that has happened before but what do you make of that George um it’s not particularly surprising I mean like I said the Russian Air Force has been extremely active in Northeast Ukraine over the last several months in the first quarter of this year the Russians dropped well over uh 2,000 Glide bombs which is in a massive volume and when you have uh you know pilots and Crews uh operating around the clock to conduct that many attacks of that high volume attacks there’s bound to be human error there’s bound to be mistakes uh the Russians similarly accidentally bombed Bel grod back in April 2023 U it’ll it’ll happen again um that’s just sort of uh part for the course when you’re conducting large scale combat operations so that’s surpris that the Russia is is prepared to pay yeah I mean it’s an unfortunate reality but um the point of it is that uh yeah pain comes to the Russians the ukrainians have struck belgrod before um the Russians have struck belgrad accidentally um I recall last year uh you know Pro Ukrainian Russian volunteers even went so far as to drive America and provided tves into belgrad where they had skirmishes and a raid um and the thing that I find notable about all this activity is these are all things these are all events that actually if you look at Russia’s uh military Doctrine and nuclear defense these are red lines that do in fact actually are Justified cause for Russia to use uh nuclear escalation um and the Russians have never ever decided that they’re going to to do that in fact because I think that well Putin correctly understands that doing so would not fix his problems it would actually generate more problems so I’m glad that we have these little anecdotes and vignettes where we can demonstrate that the Russian border is not this magical uh protective Veil that if you transgress it all of a sudden it means that we are ipof facto guaranteed towards some sort of Armageddon that’s interesting because that would be the justification that the people who are more cautious about for example using uh Western supplied weapons to strike Russian targets they would say look what we don’t want to have is an escalation that may lead to to Putin using tactical nuclear weapons but but you think the threat of that is overstated do you I do um and we could talk about the benefits of uh you know well we actually have a quite Nuance assessment for this and I’ll just take us through it real quick if you if you don’t mind yeah of course um you know um using a tactical nuclear weapon actually doesn’t solve any of the Russian problems there are there’s a place in Doctrine Russian military doctrine that prescribes how uh and the manner in which you use a tactical nuclear weapon um and and there’s really you know two basic use cases crudely speaking and that is to number one destroy a large concentration of your ADV adverse series forces uh when they present themselves in a juicy Target for maximum effect um and the second one is to facilitate uh movement on the battlefield by punching a hole in your adversary’s line and then taking your own mechanized forces and driving through the hole um in the case of the ukrainians uh the ukrainians operate along a 600 mile long front line uh they’re distributed they actually in fact have Manpower problems uh and so the ukrainians do not present themselves and provide those large juicy targets um that would naturally be attractive for uh a tactical nuclear weapon strike in the case of man Warfare um you know that requires a highly trained force it also requires a highly ready Force for there to be a mushroom cloud in the enemy line there’s now a gap and then for uh say a battalion Commander or company Commander to to point to his men and say all right guys we’re suiting up into our radioactive protective suits we’re getting into the radioactive protective vehicles and then we’re driving uh into the mushroom cloud to go ahead and exploit that I think the Russian military of early 2022 before the the officer Corps uh the modern vehicles and the professional prepared Force had been eviscerated they were prepared to do those sort of tasks they had been trained on how to do it they in principle knew how to do it but that’s not the Russian military today um it’s full of volunteers and irregular forces the elite units have all been ground out reconstituted multiple times the Russians are pulling vehicles from long-term storage and moth balls that I’m confident have not been all recertified to be able to safely operate in an a radiated contaminated Battlefield and so the Russians very well might try to drop the bomb uh to create that hole but the whole point of that is to facilitate maneuver and the Russians simply can’t do the maneuver phase um so this uh consideration in addition to the fact that we have multiple vignettes here over the course of the last you know two plus years uh where the ukrainians have indeed transgress the explicit red lines for what constitutes the reasons for when Russia militarily can use nuclear weapons defense of the Russian Homeland uh leads me to assess that you while we cannot completely rule out the risk of uh nuclear escalation it actually remains extremely low and the Russians in fact use their nuclear saber rattling in order to self-d deter the western states from undertaking the necessary decisions uh that are that that must be taken if we’re serious about helping the ukrainians defeat Russia why do you think the US for example isn’t coming to the same conclusion why do you think judging by some of their reservations in terms of how Ukraine may use its weapons to hit Russian targets what why do you think they they are more cautious about this well I I think the officials in the United States and Washington uh they have a huge responsibility to keep us uh out of Armageddon uh and that’s no easy task um and so I think they’re extremely cautious about the risk of escalation uh and it’s a it’s an inherently virtuous thing to try to risk uh to try to evade that risk however I think what has happened is that we’ve collected enough objective historical evidence from the battlefield in Ukraine and we’ve tested uh Vladimir Putin’s decision-making enough over the course of the last two and a half years that we’ can actually see that um you actually can push back on the Russians in certain kinds of ways without risking there being uh you escalation or retaliation um I think it fundamentally comes from a good place um but it’s led to decisions being made too slowly you over the course of the last uh two plus years we’ve had a series of pitched battled policy debates in Washington about the appropriateness of sending certain kinds of weapons at the beginning of 2022 it was okay we’re going to send you guys a whole bunch of stingers and javelins and hope you guys survive and then the ukrainians won the Battle of Kev and it was okay we’ll send you 777 field artillery but we’re not going to send you high Mars and any kind of vehicles and then in summer it was okay we’ll send you the himars um but we’re not going to send you anything else and then it was all right we’ll send you the Bradley’s and then it was the main battle tanks and the most recent debate item was f-16s um and each of these items had you know at least two to three months of debate associated with each of them um whereas unfortunately in reality I think any competent uh military planner looking at the requirements of the Ukrainian Battlefield and the Russian threat would understand and say of course the ukrainians are going to have to conduct combined arms Warfare here of course the Ukrainian defense industrial base um is not capable of sustaining Ukrainian war effort for a protracted period ukrainians are going to need all this stuff um and I think we could have made the decisions much sooner uh to send Ukraine uh all these systems and now also remove uh the red tape that prohibits their use against legitimate military Targets in Russia um but it’s been a slow and uous process because we’ve been trying to avoid that escalation cycle at every single juncture um and you know there there’s the roate there’s the appropriate slow response I think there can be an appropriate faster response we’ve been somewhere in the slower response so um I think that’s why we’re that’s we’re gotten where we are now yeah now it feels like Ukraine’s allies are having the same conversation all over again about whether Germany should provide the tourist missiles but we’ll leave that for the moment I want to come on to Ukraine and the potential for a Ukrainian counter offensive this year do you think there is any Prospect George of a Ukrainian counter offensive in 2024 it’s entirely dependent on two key variables and those are uh Western weapon Provisions to Ukraine do they come in sufficient volumes and do they come on a sufficient timeline to enable the ukrainians to do so and the second key variable is Ukraine’s own Force generation uh will the ukrainians be able to restore their combat Effectiveness for their existing brigades and will the ukrainians be successful in the formation of approximately 10 new brigades that they’re in the process of forming now um if both of those conditions are correct and true Aid comes in time and high enough volume and two the ukrainians get to reconstitute their their force uh then yes there are opportunities for the ukrainians to conduct I think uh limited counter offensive option operations in late 2024 um but I want to talk a little bit about the importance of the ukrainians conducting a counter offensive um the counter offensive doesn’t exist for the sake of the counter offensive uh the counter offensive is much more important in terms of long-term higher level operational uh planning and campaign design because uh if the ukrainians do not do any sort of active operations they do not perform something active and I’m not talking about a ma a massive large decisive counter offense of like how was planned in 2023 what it does is it deao seeds the military initiative uh to the Russian military and that means that the Russians get to present the ukrainians a series of bad options do you defend detet or do you defend against a new offensive in harke and if God forbid the Russians decide to open up a new offensive elsewhere in Ukraine then it forces the ukrainians to contort themselves in all kinds of directions uh and spread their themselves thin uh in order to just react to the Russians and the Russians if they’re skillful in how they employ their own campaign design they will deliberately create these dilemmas so that six months from now so that 18 months from now so 24 months from now the ukrainians will be in a much weaker spot the only way for the ukrainians to break out of this is by messing up the Russian plan and in fact imposing some dilemas on the Russians that forc the Russians to make a decision uh about where to prioritize Russian resources about how to uh defend the territory that the Russians hold even if it’s in a small limited sort of way and uh the proponents of saying oh 2025 is the magical year when in which the ukrainians must conduct a counter offense of then for for whatever reason um that implicitly says we’re okay with seeding the initiative to Ukraine for for all of 20 seeding the initiative to the Russians for all of 2024 um and generally in Warfare whoever holds the initiative for the longer period of time or the most they have the advantage and so what we’ve been trying to do the Institute is educate people about you know the importance of uh campaign design of the operational art um and also the importance of the military initiative and the ukrainians should try to contest that even if it’s in a limited way I mean that’s really interesting because look most people watching would support a Ukrainian counter offensive sooner rather than later but I suppose the danger George is you have a similar situation to last year where if you had a counter offensive launch too early what what if it’s not effective enough exactly so um there’s a couple critiques that we can learn from the counter offense of last year part of it is that you know that was that was planned to be a single large decisive offensive operation um and it it it was too ambitious it wasn’t proper scoped um it underestimated the Russian defense it overestimated uh the Ukrainian capabilities with uh the weapons that they were provided it used outdated Doctrine um that that we only just learned through that counter offensive that is indeed now in fact outdated and the ukrainians went into it under armed um they didn’t have attack ons like to strike a Russian Airfield that used H that you know launched uh sorted helicopters to blunt the main Ukrainian thrust and the ukrainians went in with insufficient breaching assets um and so what we actually know is that you know these massive Hail Mary major counter offensives they can actually have strategic impacts if they fail and and you don’t need to conduct you know one massive decisive counter offensive to contest the initiative you can actually contest the initiative with a series of smaller properly scoped uh less ambitious operations that risk less but also can create the the the positive effects of contesting the initiative um the the sort of example that I have in my mind is looking at the two successful uh Ukrainian counter offensive operations from 2022 um that actually nicely played off of each other and were much smaller in scale than the unsuccessful counter offens of of 23 that were the Ukrainian offensive for hon that liberated the South um earlier in the summer and then the other uh Ukrainian counter offensive for harke in the Northeast which liberated much of har o blast and went into lanso blast in September um both of those in terms of their Geographic scope their tactical and operational objectives and the amount of Ukrainian units and Manpower that actually went into those fights those were much smaller um and they were better scoped they forced the Russians to pick and choose which parts of the theater are they going to prioritize um and and it that those were more effective because of um the the Contours of that um the ukrainians can actually replicate I think that experience and create and launch these smaller properly scoped operations that just force the Russians to react Force the Russians to decide where do they defend and throw off kilter of the Russian plans to try to fix and pin the ukrainians in nine different directions this way to to the Moon across the very large Ukrainian theater let’s for sake of argument say it is late 2024 that that Ukraine is in a position to launch some counter defensive operations what do you think their tactical and operational objectiv should be until then yeah until then their tactical objectives uh should be to at trit the Russian military as much as possible eliminate and Destroy as much Russian combat power as possible uh and hold on to the operationally significant territories that the ukrainians are currently defending right now the Russians are gunning for some very operationally significant uh tactical objectives in Den oblast if the viewers look at a map of uh the northern section of den oblas to the immediate sort of Northwest vicinity of bmot there’s a series of large Ukrainian cities slaviansk kator dka constantina um the latter of which constantina is only about six kilometers away from the current front line uh at chivar those are very large cities each of those are roughly if not more than twice the size of bako and I think we all remember how arduous the urban campaign for bmot was um those are what we call them sort of uh Ukrainian Fortress cities uh because they’re extremely difficult to capture um and whoever holds them will have a massive uh Defender benefit we’re concerned that if the Russians manage to needle their way past chass ofar and work their way into uh the chain of those uh closely uh dispositioned to each other Fortress cities then the Russians might be able to work their way and try to peel off constantina the southernmost uh City in that chain um and try to systematically dismantle uh that Ukrainian defense if the ukrainians manag to uh survive and defend off Russian attacks to get into those operational significant cities the ukrainians will be in a much better place to defend the rest of denet coblast if the ukrainians lose those cities then we’re getting into the territory of you know looking at some very significant operational changes and some territory that will be very difficult for the ukrainians to liberate in the future just finally George given that and given the ongoing threat of fresh Russian ground offensive is May 2024 one of the most important months of this War I think it will be one of the most important months um the situation is very dire you know we’re at a position here where the Russians have learned a lot of lessons from their failed uh offensive operations they are innovating they have Incorporated the Glide bombs in a fundamentally new way to have the Air Force which has largely not played an a very active role in the war so far but to play a key supporting role to enable Russian maneuver on the ground we’ve broken out of the stage of uh of of positional Warfare think we were all talking about how there was a so-called stalemate I never agreed it was a stalemate but we had a positional nature of the war when the battle lines locked down back in September but the Russians are they’re broken out of it um through economic power through their ability to generate more soldiers through military learning uh and Innovation at the operational level of war the Russians are restoring maneuver to the battlefield the ukrainians are are currently at one of the lowest points that they’ve been at in terms of their strength um both because they are treed and tired from fighting and they need a much badly uh required resupply which is now thankfully on the way and so I think the St the lines are going to stabilize in the coming weeks but uh this particular next uh you know four to six weeks it’s going to be a it’s going to be a very challenging period but the light’s at the end of the tunnel and as long as we can we can evade disaster which I I think is not that likely the ukrainians prospects are going to turn up George paros always great to have you on front line thank you so much for your time today thanks so much for having me James always a pleasure and I hope you have a great week thank you for watching Frontline for times radio for more click subscribe on our YouTube channel you can listen to times radio and you can read more about the war in Ukraine and Global Security with your times digital subscription

“Recently There have not been any kind of operationally significant gains that threatened to fundamentally unhinge Ukraine’s ability to defend the rest of the province.”

Russia’s loss of manoeuvre warfare capable units has degraded their capability to make battlefield gains and make use of tactical nuclear weapons, George Barros from @UnderstandingWarOrg tells Frontline on #timesradio

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