That's a tight argument, but it doesn't quite match who said what and when. By December 2021, the US chain of command was quite certain that Russia would invade. Independent analysts might not have, but they didn't have the same HUMINT and SIGINT that the White House did. It's later the White House and the Pentagon that completely miss how the combat would play out even with months of war gone by. I think beyond gathering the intelligence, knowing what the Russian were going to do was as easy as knowing "Cindy told Robin that Brad is taking her to the dance." They tell you what they're doing. Knowing the Russian capabilities is a different issue ("Is Brad gonna get lucky?") because the Russian's themselves didn't know how bad they were. What makes me wonder if Jake Sullivan is as dumb as a box of hammers, or just sinister, is that he's been so wrong for so long about Russia that you have to wonder why he still has a job that doesn't involve offering french fries as an option.
And also fail to estimate likelyhoods of the negative outcomes of backing a Nuclear Superpower into a corner. (If they do how much faith would you put in the estimation). There's is a strong argument that the policy preventing action deep into Russian territories against assets they deem pivotal , to be wise, at least with repect to crossing an escalotary threshold that would shred this thin mask of the war being between Ukraine and Russia. Russia certainly sees past this falsehood.
Our intellectuals/experts have become juvenile, ignorant dilettantes. This is an embarrassment if it’s an attempt at accountability and fixing the problem.
It’s as if we don’t spend billions and billions of taxpayer money to fund intelligence agencies. Same true of the Viet Nam, Iraq, & Afghanistan invasions. “We thought they’d be like us.” The words of a clueless, belligerent narcissist.
Considering the heritage of a Nation that has plundered the resources of the Citizens who inhabited the North American Continent for thousands of Years, they should understand a Nation like Ukraine that had withstood centuries of conflicts as Empires clashed in the area?
The fact that the British and US personnel were intensively training the Ukrainian Armed Forces since 2014 show that there is a sector in the British / US military whobsaw the potential of the Ukrainians as capable to resist the Russian Army.
I wouldn’t say intense. There was training going on but intense was not the work I would use. I think we might have trained about 40k mostly national guard. Most of that training was “defensive” in nature. Often the trainers were training guys who fought 2014-16 and have said they learned more than vice versa. This is a generality. Certainly we helped but imagine if we had trained pilots, air defense crews, etc. in my opinion the commitment was the minimum to provide credible deterrence but not on the level of training we did in Middle East, not by a long shot.
@@vbcountryboy I'll piggyback on that by saying I met some of those folks in-country and it was never something that impressed me as a major commitment. I'd also add that it was a political decision before it was a military one. The training along with the Javelins that Trump was trying to hold up were first an item in a Congrassional budget before it was an programme.
We underestimated Putins will to eat the cost of invading Ukraine and we overestimated Western willingness to send billions of dollars for yet another war. Not to mention the crisis in Gaza has made every moral stand the West made in Ukraine look completely hypocritical. It's amazing to me how completely disillusioned these experts are from reality
@@alexhumble7653 I think most of the volunteer fighters prefer being called "volunteers". There's pay, but it's not more than E-level pay in the US. And it's certainly a lot more than British. Almost every western European country, North American, Oceania, Georgian, Belarusian... some Latin Americans (Mexicans mostly). We've quite a lot of international trainers beyond the US and UK, now, obviously. Colombian demining... It's just Ukraine is big and the forces large on both sides, so there never have been enough qualified foreign trainers or enough time.
One really big factor is...there is a big elephant in the operations room. Fear, fear of those in power and operational control. That fear can translate into stunted decision-making.
Yep, the 2014-21 period was horrible, I’m not sure fear was it, some of the decisions point to collaboration with Russia. It wasn’t illegal pre 2014 and a lot of Russian money flowed into politics back then. Germany, France, Italy, etc. that had long term effects. Russia started planning this as a possible contingency, I think around 2006. So the west was politically open to malign activity without taking it seriously. When things went pear shaped in 2014, we did nothing. It set the stage for always being two steps behind the Russians. We could make that up but the fear you talk about kicks in.
I thought before the war that this would be the most colossal mistake Putin could ever make. I was in Kharkiv right before the war and people were saying they were ready to fight no matter what it takes, but most didn't think Putin would be that stupid. One make thing I can surmise in the aftermath of the full scale invasion is that we seemed not to have to asked the Baltics send Polish about the Russian mentality and how to respond. Western analysts are stuck in cold war paradigms.
You were wrong then - Putin has pretty much defeated Nato, not just Ukraine. There was no full scale invasion - even now - Putin has always held a massive reserve in case Nato chose to enter a war directly against Russia. But instead Nato just sent its weapons (it saw how nearly a million Ukrainians were going to die so sent old tanks, trainers and missile specialists but no one to the front). Essentially Putin has shown how superior Russian arms are to the wests, how superior the soldiers are, the tactics and ability to adjust tactics, and it has cost him some 70-100k soldiers (with maybe 15k of them from prisons). Nato is now meaningless. The US collapse has been so unveiled that Hamas has been willing too attack Israel and the Yemenis freely attack US aircrat carriers. It has suceeded beyond Putin's or Xi's wildest dreams.
@@antique-bs8bb "defeated nato" ... rofl. putin single handedly has caused the most explosive redevelopment of nato. literally every single european nation is now looking to pivot social spending to military spending. putin's actions in the face of non-stop options for taking the off ramp has literally led to the RE-militarization of europe.... poland 5% gdp on military spending. Germany hits 2% for first time in 30 years with €100 billion infusion in 2023 and calls for hitting 3-5% gdp to military going forward. france hit 2% nato target, and just last year macron proposed €70 billion (€495 billion over 7 years). Finland hit 2.3% of target... All of europe is re-militarizing and you say nato is meaningless? No sir, nato *was* ... but putin has changed that.
Allah help America if these are the expert analysts at RAND shaping US foreign policy. We don’t expect Russia to do anything when we park a threat right at Russia’s vulnerable border where the last invasion towards Moscow came from
Its very sad to witness this crap. at 52 minutes they still bringing up 1000 casualties a day. Like what? Are these guys really expecting us to believe that russia is in a more dire position than ukraine when it comes to man power? The side with multiples more artillery, drones, armour, ammunitions, air power, missiles etc is taking higher casualties?
I just downloaded your report, and so maybe you address some of this is in there, but based on what I've heard CSIS say before, you folks seem REALLY distant from Ukraine. You seem very comfortable there off Scott Cirlce in DC. Have you been in-country and spoken to the grunts about what kind of training their getting? About how absolutely Soviet parts of the ZSU still functions? I also don't think you have a really good handle on the Ukrainian people, culture, or economy. Talking to a handful of Ukrainians who were sent to a conference at Ramstein, and not knowing enough to genuinely challenge them on what they're saying is gone result with quite a lot of BS in the brain. I think one of the most telling things about how pathetic the Russian forces are presently is knowing how dysfunctional the Ukrainian ones are (on average). I'm not meaning to throw blanket criticism over your work, but rather to say that the weakness in it is that you don't seem to spend any time in Ukraine itself.
😂😂😂The failure is not in analytics itself, the failure is the US policy makers who where to arrogant to listen to the many reputable individuals who predicted the war, including William Burns (2008 memo).
Very good remarks on the same shaky assumptions being made right now regarding the Indo-Pacific. Looking forward to hearing more on this in the future.
I'm not surprised that so many so-called experts in academia experienced analytical failures regarding Russia's military capabilities vis-a-vis Ukraine. Russia has always started slow but over time overcame its initial difficulties. Resilience is its calling card, whether it's WWII, Chechnya or Georgia. Afghanistan was an outlier because it tried to establish a permanent presence. Even the US could not do that in the 2000s.
They still haven't realized that they were too busy counting trees to see the wood. Russia obviously never intended to conquer Ukraine, but just to change Kiev's pro-NATO anti-Russia policy. They deliberately refrained from war and instead conducted a kid-gloves special military operation that avoided civilian deaths and left themselves vulnerable. The Istanbul negotiation made this clear.
This proposition is absurd on its face, unless by "just to change Kiev's pro-NATO anti-Russia policy" you mean they intended to assassinate Ukraine's executive government, destroy its civil society, kill its best soldiers and install pro-Kremlin puppets that would formally accept Russian annexation of Crimea and the Donbass. Its like saying someone didn't intend to commit rape, they were simply determined to have sex over their partner's objections and had to get rough. Obviously shameless.
Very early in the conflict, a former advisor to president Putin was on CGTN stating that the russian objective was to "crush the ukraine military". They have never deviated from this objective.
@@asc5882 Putin claimed He wanted to eliminate the Nazis. Kyiv landed a missile on the POW camp that they had the Azov Boys in. Zelenskyy seems to be attempting to help Kill Nazis.
@@Tiasung The USA needs the resources under Russia, it is pretty apparent since the 1990's. Hitler tried to appropriate Caspian Oil. Hitler learned a lesson as Zhukov came to Berlin. Russia saw Victoria coming 30 years ago and prepared.
Thisdelectable hindsight is satisfying to anyone who says today "I predicted this years ago" and no one listened. Sadly, no one important is listening now. I'm just here to say, "I care!"
Everything that happened was predicted five years ago. Everything that didn't happen was predicted five years ago too. Five years ago it's hard to tell the difference between these two groups.
Baltic States continually tried to warn the West since 2012 that Putin would try to invade Ukraine in long term stages and they did not listen. Today they finally do listen to former illegally occupied States.
As a Ukrainian, I have to say that both Serhii Plokhii and Timothy Snyder are wrong about some aspects of Ukrainian history. For a better education you should listen to the local Ukrainian historians, not the U.S. based.
They had a short glimpse at the beginning where they found out, that they didn’t ask military personnel that have dealt with ukrainian troops. In fact the Ukrainian army got schooled by western military personnel after the Donbas and Crimea occupation 2014. I think there were also many contacts with Ukrainians in Iraq, but for sure in some UN missions. You also have military personnel of other friendly nations having a lot of contact to the Ukrainian military. + compare the georgian war 2008 on how the Russians performed. I thought the Russians crushed the georgians very fast, but all experts said that the Russians were shocked by their own inability and started many changes after that…
The estimates are that Ukraine has lost 600,000 dead, and 1million casualties. The Artillery ratio is 7 to 1 in favor of Russia. Russia has control of Air space without utilizing their Air superiority against Ukraine. These people with all their credentials are not serious analysts, or their ideology is so bias that makes them sound stupid.
When you see the name Kagan, you know a grift is afoot. They are always wrong in their predictions, spectacularly so, and are punished by having money shot at them with a firehose.
CSIS is an other American institution with just a American view of things that happened in February 2022. The first words that came out of the mouth of the first speaker was that at February 2022 was a full scale invasion. Now if you see that Russia used 60.000 troops by this invasion you can hardly call it a ful scale invasion. Furthermore whil the Istanbul agreement was negotiated, ukraine ask for russia to pull back to the border . Ukraine betrayed the Russians after Boris Johnson visited kiev in April 2022. Now I got to question the neutrality of the participants of this debate or better propaganda talks. Well done but nobody with more then one braincell know this is just nato rhetoric.
My take on deficiencies on this (w/o reading the paper) is the general lack of basic scientific scientific tenets. Ingrained biases are present in all analysis today. I predicted the war in public in 2008 as an American living in Ukraine. I received a poor reception from both US A and Ukrainians. I repeatedly punched my fist in the years leading up to the 2022 conflict on how wrong we were wrong. The USA failed Ukraine because of these assumptions. Ukraine was blocked from purchasing systems that could have prevented this horrible war. People look at Russia like it’s the Soviet Union, they fail to understand how important Ukraine was to what little success the CCCP had.
Honestly that’s a good question, if you mean the “experts” or intel analysts I would like to believe that some do. However, those that don’t should. This wars outcome will shape Americas future too.
@@vbcountryboy Yes because increasing escalation with Russia on their existential fears of US/NATO starting the next nuclear Operation Barbarossa will doom all of America into a nuclear holocaust where most of it's cities will end up like Hiroshima instead of pushing the alliance back to Poland. This war should be the final lesson in American folly before they bankrupt themselves as the US dollar goes down. Maybe this war will teach the US the limits of US power, stop the delusion of unipolarity and make the nation focus more on the corruption at home, the wealth disparity that has completely eroded democracy into oligarchy, the over-arching security state it has become overrun by bureaucrats and thinktanks and for a start revert back to the pragmatism back in the Cold War where US power/greed was checked/limited by the USSR/WP.
@@neolord50pro77 it has already lost: even if the military actions ended today, Ukraine would no longer be viable: millions of citizens would not return, not from Russia, not from the EU countries, industry has been destroyed (the war has nothing to do with it, it was destroyed by the Maidan government, deliberately, since 2014), energy has been destroyed, agriculture has been destroyed - the fields are strewn with depleted uranium - which the Ukrainians were very happy about, by the way.
Analytic failure of Russia underestimating how much NATO already had weaponized Ukraine and the analyitic failure of underestimating how resilient Russia fends off and outproduces the combined West.
I know Dr Phillips O'Brein, great strategists, very excited discussion, I thanked all CSIS team and host and our respected and honorable guests. Thanks.
It deserves to be. That discussion was smug fatuous nonsense from start to finish. Anyone would think Ukraine was winning the war listening to these halfwits.
I like these people, not lording their intelligence over each other but sharing to the group their perspective, they keep saying “ if I may…” when they want to speak, quite refreshing
This discussion is just a bunch of pro-Western Russophobic "analysts" sharing their "expertise" about the Ukrainian war. At one point, one of the "experts" says: "We did not expect that Putin would act irrationally and invade Ukraine" (or words to that effect) The common thread in the discussion seems to be: The west overestimated the capabilities of the Russian military. The west underestimated the capabilities of the Ukrainian military. The discussion is just a rehash of the western myth: Plucky little Ukraine punching above its weight and defeating the evil Russians. This is the reality of the origins of the Ukrainian war (which is NOT discussed by the "experts"): The war in Ukraine was caused by a United States attempt to turn Ukraine into a NATO BANTUSTAN from which the Russian heartland could be constantly threatened. Russia will NEVER tolerate NATO expansion into Ukraine. Period. Full Stop. You can agree or disagree with the Russian position that NATO expansion into Ukraine poses a vital threat to Russian security. But the fact remains: That IS THE RUSSIAN POSITION. The Americans knew full well that Russia would never tolerate NATO expansion into Ukraine. CIA Director William Burns was US Ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008. Burns was told by many different Russians in no uncertain terms that NATO expansion into Ukraine was a REDLINE that the Russians would not tolerate. Burns wrote a memo to his superiors in Washington D.C. The title of the memo was: NYET MEANS NYET. (NO MEANS NO). The memo summarized the talks Burns had with different Russians: NATO expansion into Ukraine is a redline that the Russians will not tolerate. Nevertheless, the Bush Administration in 2008 announced that NATO would expand into Ukraine. Since 2008 the Obama administration continued the plan of NATO expansion into Ukraine. In 2010 Viktor Yanukovych was elected President of Ukraine. The Yanukovych administration pursued a course of friendly relations with Russia and refused NATO expansion into Ukraine. For this policies, the United States engineered a coup d'etat against Yanukovych in 2014. Yanukovych was overthrown. Victoria Nuland from the Obama State Department paraded around the Maidan square handing out cookies to the Ukrainian ultra nationalists involved in the Maidan square event. Nuland was taped discussing who should be the next Ukrainian president. The United States has had VETO POWER when it comes to selecting the next Ukrainian president ever since Maidan. Ukraine today is a NATO BANTUSTAN. It depends on Western economic, diplomatic and military aid for its survival. The idea that NATO membership is worth the destruction and loss of life that Ukraine has experienced is absurd. There is only ONE WINNER in the Ukraine war: The United States. The United States managed to corral the European Union into imposing sanctions against Russia in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The European Union has been reduced to a proxy of the US State Department when it comes to its policy towards Ukraine. Germany used to buy cheap Russian natural gas through the Baltic sea pipelines. When the US blew up the pipeline, it dealt a crippling blow to Germany.
@@ГлебВерховский-п2рyup. Far more articulated than typical propaganda b0t$ but still. Never the less, this is the actual Russian position, rational or not.
Bullshit. This is pure Russian propaganda. Pretending that poor little russia had no choice but to attack Ukraine. Putin is a megalomaniac trying to reconstitute "greater Russia" and all your bs is just deflection.
The comparer articulation skills are almost painful to hear. What is clear to me after this discussion is Russia never really wanted to conquer Ukraine. It really was a special millitary operation. West made it into a big regional war, almost an existential one for Europe, in order to isolate and punish Russia. An element of Continuation of American hegemony ober Europe can also not be discounted
Spot on. At Istanbul, Ukraine had a choice. Suffer relatively few losses, forswear NATO and recognise the Russian speakers of the Donbass/Crimeas right to self-determination. Or, reject Russias offer and turn Ukraine into a charnel house. Zelensky chose the latter.
It’s such a BS that intelligences didn’t have access to assess the level of Ukrainian army or training. We had a huge volunteer movement among both the military and civilians. They were quite vocal about the army as an institution. Most of all, all the modern approaches like the use of drone reconnaissance and software for artillery precision came from the volunteer units. Even a proper analysis of open sources would’ve sufficed if the Western analysts didn’t operate on some outdated assumptions.
In light of actual reality, selfmedication is sorely needed, it cannot be easy, it must be learned , only the exceptional can practice it at this sophisticated level - a jawdropper...
IMHO, when analysts look at other military’s they compare it to their own. The analyst are also from the officer class who have little if any experience with enlisted rank requirements. The technology now demands highly trained enlisted personnel to use and repair equipment. No matter how good your equipment is if you don’t use it to its potential and able to repair after use it becomes a lump of metal.
The estimate of Russian reaction was based far too much on calling Russian bluff because the USA and UK intelligence services really didn’t believe Russia would cross into Ukraine because they had folded before. Yes it is true Ukraine military forces fought well in the first year until they fell upon Russian prepared defences in the North and South of Ukraine following the initial land grab as Russian forces moved back. These top trained forces got bloody nosed and required 10 months to train replacements for the June offensive where they were destroyed following mobile warfare systems. These tactics do not allow for aerial relaying of cleared minefields cutting off attacking forces from there resupply lines. Defences in six line depth have never seen an attack attempted against a peer enemy
Russian trolling in fact or effect. The only legitimate security concern for Russia is that a corrupt autocracy will perform poorly compared to a reforming democratic neighbor state. Invasion isn't a legitimate response.
Of course, the Russian for “legitimate concerns” would be paranoia in any other language. How else to explain the world’s largest country since at least 1700 blowing up a period of prosperity every other generation for the compulsion to conquer yet more Eurasian wasteland? (Full of peoples prone to rebellion that frankly aren’t worth the cost of keeping down. If productive Muscovites subsidizing Ramzan Kadyrov’s cosplay khanate-and occasionally getting shot by him-is what winning the Chechen war looks like, how could losing have been any more humiliating?) On the bright side, the lasting result of this whole conflict, wherever the frontline ends up, is something the Russians, Americans, French, British, and Poles can all get behind: Knocking Germany down to size! Together we defeated Hitler, and together we defeated the smug parasitic superiority of Merkel’s export-led growth model.
@@christopherrubicam4474 Hmmm....that's a really bad joke. Ukraine in 2022 was the most corrupt country in Europe with a democracy that only functioned when the US allowed it. That was illustrated nicely when the US (with the assistance of a Kagan-in-law Victoria Nuland) helped overthrow an elected government. That trick triggered a civil war. The Ukrainian army was largely territorial so the units stationed in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk kept their uniforms but changed patches. What was left of the Ukrainian Army charges in and promptly gets trapped - with Minsk I saving their bacon, followed by Minsk II. Pity the security guarantees on those agreements by Germany and France were bogus. This is a civil war. The people living in the areas now hosting the RF forces want to be part of the RF and want no part of Kiev. (Can you blame them? Ukraine is poor, corrupt and has the lowest population replacement rate in Europe. And they host proto-fascist militias - condemned by the West until February 2022.) Unlike most citizens of the leader of the "rules based international order" I have been watching developments in Ukraine for years. Let's see - how do we put this simply? NATO members may well host US forces and US nuclear weapons - you will find them in Romania, Poland and Germany. Russia's border with Ukraine is huge and Moscow didn't want US forces there or in the Black Sea. Of course there's always the matter of sovereignty. After 1991 Ukraine was a sovereign state. NATO is made up of sovereign states. So if Ukraine applies to NATO and NATO members agree, well, the deal is done and democracy wins again. We've gone through this before after all. In 1962, Cuba, a sovereign state with good reason to fear attack by the US, asked the USSR - another sovereign state - to station nuclear weapons in their homeland. And the US, a respecter of sovereignty, plunged the world to the brink of Armageddon to prevent having potentially hostile nukes on their border. But it's ok if the US does it. And the integrity of national borders - very important. Of course in the late 90s NATO partitioned Serbia by force of arms on the basis of self-determination. And they helped start the Syrian Civil War to .... protect Syria from ISIS? And they demolished Libya ... I guess because they could. And let's see, how many countries have hosted US armed forces at war since I've been politically aware....Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq - I bet I've missed some place. (As I recall, we have diplomatic relations with the PRC. If so, that means we recognize the "One China" policy. And if that's true why are we selling sophisticated arms to Taiwan and preparing for a naval war in the Pacific? We wouldn't want China to get uppity in the South China Sea would we. Wonder why they call it the South China Sea?) I'm not a Russian troll. I teach and write history for a living. Facing the truth is part of the job. Right now the US is a danger to world peace. And all to keep the US in the position of the "indispensable nation" and sole superpower. Breaks my heart watching a country that once did stand for freedom turn into what we opposed just to remain a hegemon.
First of all, it’s a great conversation, and I love the honesty and acceptance. It’s been a great talk. However, I disagree with a few points. Let's start with what you said. Yes, we made mistakes on two fronts: first, believing there would be no war, and second, thinking Russia would simply overpower Ukraine because of their numbers and experience. We thought it would be like other conflicts we’ve seen. Why do I disagree? First of all, I also made the mistake of thinking there would be no invasion. But on the second point, I believe overestimating Russia was incorrect, and here's why: This war wasn't planned in 2022; the CIA, MI6, and NATO had been preparing for it since 2014. They knew it was coming. We have to acknowledge how well their strategy was developed-they knew exactly how Russia would attack and how to respond. It was incredibly well-planned. Plus, it’s not just Ukraine fighting-NATO is providing intelligence and ammunition, making it a proxy NATO war. So, do you think it’s just Ukraine, or is it really NATO fighting through them? Also, if you are well-prepared to defend with a strong intelligence team, you are bound to lose fewer people. Russia made a huge mistake by underestimating Ukraine. Never take an enemy lightly, no matter how small. Russia initially came in with bad plans, trying to overwhelm Ukraine. But NATO’s intelligence must have had counterstrategies in place, which is why Russia lost so many weapons, aircraft, and men. But then, by 2023, Russia learned from its mistakes and started acting more carefully. You have to understand that Russia is not just facing Ukraine, but also proxy NATO forces and mercenaries. While Russia had to face sanctions and limited access to weapons, Ukraine had support from around 30 countries supplying weapons and resources. Wars is fought with men and ammunitions, and Ukraine was getting supply of ammunation from west . I think Russia has shown incredible resilience and strength against proxy NATO forces.
"Russia had to face sanctions and limited access to weapons." You'll be heartbroken then at all the Russian, North Korean and Iranian munitions that have just been destroyed en-masse at various ammo depots in Russia. Who else do you think should be sending Russia arms and mercenaries to help?
@@bakedbean37 First ,why should I be heartbroken? 2nd Russia started getting wepaons very late unlike Ukraine which was getting support from 2014. 3rd Western wepaon are precision weapon highly sophisticated but Iran and N. Korea is not match 4th The biggest factor in this war is intellignce specially US haa cutting edge spy sattelite aa huge factor 5)The technology from 30 Nations such as Germany,France UK ,,US Canada and many others vs technology from just one country as in Russian .. Every country is unique let's say Swedish good ith radars drones french good with precision etc etc ..that is huge factor . 6)What no one is talking about many global companies helping Ukraine in many ways 7h and golden rule :: If you build youre defensive position very strong (Ukraine. With NATO did this ) The whole world knows about listening post around Ukraine air defense etc ,the loss of men would be very less while trh attacking position had to suffer huge loss . Russia was fighting a proxy NATO not Ukraine from the day one Tell me one thingh if you are honest are special forces from some countries were operating as merccennirre or not. Tell military engineering unit from many countries were operating or not? Tell me was Britain team not actively involved in hittting Russain navy or not. How do most missiles operate are they not using US satellites... Tell me something how many billions have been given to Ukraine. For arms and men. So even with all this factors small Ukraine fighting Ruussia really . It's proxy NATO. vs Russian..
I find it quite odd that the panel reports many analysts did not ask the question about the effect of corruption on Russian military. Given the trope in news media over decades about how corrupt Soviet then Russian society was, as an average person I would ask that question, how then were the experts so limited in their focus?
Have you ever considered you analyzed under false assumptions about the initial war goals of the Russians. You follow blindly the western narrative that Putin wanted to annex the ukrain all along, and that deterring Nato expansion played no role
@@7scientist Yes, you are right, an invasion force of less than 200,000 men is more than enough to occupy the largest country in Europe and restore the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. Your teachers can be proud of you, they raised a genius!
These speakers are part of the machine of the western narrative,they have not one unbias bone in their body,these are the same people who helped to start the war.
How did deterring NATO expansion go? Hope no more countries with capable militaries joined since the war started? Was there a clause in the NATO charter that forbid countries with active border disputes (like the one in the Donbas) from joining?
Eliot Cohen says RU experience in syria is bombing civilians so no experience in terms of battle hardened. Is this the same eliot who says the opposite when isreal bombs civilians? cant be the same guy
The main strem media now is very little critical to what they post/send. There is alot of underestemating of peoples abilitys to stand up and fight for their people/country! Im from Europe btw and was invaded in WW2.
Obsessed with PR and media hype Zelenskyy is in DC, so hapless Ukrainian cannon fodder in Vuhledar is doomed. As usual officers already left Vuhledar leaving hapless cannon fodder behind. With such a staggering rate of losses, Zelenskyy thugs are struggling to kidnap off the streets enough even for simple replacement, to say nothing about the quality and motivation of this hapless cannon fodder.
Maybe they can last till November 2024 elections, the Western world goes in US election cycles. Maybe Americans will pull another Afghanistan one day just give up and move on and pretend it never happened.
Nice ruZZian trolling attempt. I am surprise you didn't try to say Zelenskyy was driving his new Lamborghini to New York or staying on his new yacht in harbor, FFS.
@37:00 This is actually a very important point. Why is it that when presenting a complex topic like war and international relations, Networks aren't looking to have complex and nuanced views discussed? Sure clicks and views are important but on a 24 hour news cycle there is so much time for actual discussions and educating the public.
When you're fighting a defensive war against a much larger enemy, survival is victory. No one acts like America won the Vietnam war, even though the death and destruction were way more lopsided.
@@Espiritu-o7x Really? Western advisors told us how to carry out reforms in Russia that ultimately failed. At a key moment, the West did not give money. The West supported people who said that Russia did not need machine tools and factories, because everything could be bought in the West. With such friends you don't need enemies.
@@martincerny3294the only mistake was that the Russians at the point bought the BS from the west, only to slowly realize they would never be accepted and treated as Europeans and that US will always need sizable enemy to fearmonger
Grateful for this long-awaited, insightful document; footnotes/appendices included. Tim Snyder rightly laments academic favour of social sciences over the humanities? Where have economic & social history, as well as geography (topography, climate, demography) been factored into received wisdom? Kitchen sink methodology perhaps, but did any "experts" bother to watch "The Servant of the People" and reflect on its themes? Surely history teacher, landslide elected, President Goloborodko would have made that selfie video on 26 February 2022 - albeit with a few bleeps.
The even bigger failure was instigating failure of the Istanbul talks in the belief that Russia’s army was absolutely rotten and could be easily beaten. The cost in Ukrainian lives and treasure has been a horrendous tragedy.
This is a basic misunderstanding of what took place at the beginning of the invasion. Refer to this cogent comment I've gone down this rabbit hole deeply (There are long interviews about these peace talks with people in the know with various claims, Arakhamia, Naftali Bennet, Ex Ambassador Chalyi) What I think is that Putin is massively overselling the degree to which Russia and Ukraine were willing to accept mutual terms ignoring western influence. There has never been a deal put forward where anyone has claimed that Russia was willing to simply vacate the annexed territories minus Crimea (and why would they?) We know that to this day, Ukraine still is not willing to accept the annexed portions of the Donbass as Russian, so why would they be willing to do this 2 months after the war when they were having successes on the battlefield? Boris Johnson, by the way, is claimed to have ended the peace deal after two months of deliberation that did not deliver on anything specific. It isn't like he killed a nascent deal. Next, Putin's own narrative about this literally doesn't make sense (but it doesn't have to in the current soundbite/social media climate). He more or less states that he invaded Ukraine for at least 3 reasons Some convoluted historical grievance argument going back unironically 1000 years To denazify Ukraine Because NATO Why would he then want peace without rectifying any of those problems?? On point #3, 90% of Ukrainians now want to join NATO. So his narrative is essentially, we had to invade for these reasons, but we totally wanted peace soon after even though none of the reasons for invasion have been dealt with. Why would Ukraine want to sign away 15% of their country after early successes and having 0 trust in Russia? Then there is the fact that the UK and US don't actually have much leverage to force Ukraine to fight. The US couldn't even get the grifting Afghan government that was massively benefitting from the US to fight against the Taliban, a much weaker foe. Whatever leverage the US has over Ukraine is infinitely less than what the US had over the ANA, and they still collapsed quickly. Say Ukraine really wanted to sign the "peace deal" that probably would have included officially and immediately giving away ~15% of their country. What could the US do to stop this? Zelensky has been stalwart and has basically gone on tours around the world constantly begging for weapons and the US literally offered to help him flee the country on the onset of the war but he chose to stand his ground and fight. Arakhamia, the head of the Ukrainian delegation, also stated in an interview that the west only advised and the final decision was Ukraine's. This narrative is bullshit on so many levels, not to mention that even if there was a "peace deal" that it would not be some panacea that people are characterizing it as. There would be ZERO guarantee that such a deal wouldn't just lead to a further conflict 4 or 5 years later.
Russia made it fail in the belief thay its army was absolutely brilliant. How desperate is Ivan today that he has to bash himself to try to blame America!
An enormous amount of waffle and not saying much. Ps. Russia initial invasion was simply to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table, which it did. Then the US and UK scuppered the deal that was reached and then a full scale war ensued. By the way Ukraine has lost this war.
@@FrancoisMouton-iu7jt I never said Ukraine had won already, only that they haven't yet lost. They're still in the fight, and the ammo dumps are visible proof of that. Wars aren't about being bigger and stronger - they're about achieving strategic goals. Russia has not yet achieved its strategic goals. Given NATO expansion into Sweden and Finland, they've had a major strategic setback.
@@johnschwartz1641 yo Johnny do the thing that you answer every single comment that bursts the bubble in your head, we sure will not take you for the empty head zealot that you are.
@@johnschwartz1641 Speaking of achieving strategic goals Ukraine unlike Russia stated their goals and that is regaining 1991 borders and expelling Russian army from the Ukraine. So keep that in mind because by their own definition Ukraine is losing right now.
This talk doesn't have a satisfying conclusion. It's basically we were wrong because of our biases, we need to do better. They only thing I see from this is that the biases will be over corrected into opposite direction
They have a Wiki, there's no reason to ask seemingly provocative questions when they can all be answered with a simple Google search. They're an American Think Tank, it's not that deep.
Its an American Strategic think tank. Why are you even asking those questions lol? The audience is people in other think tinks, USA military, USA gov/intelligence, officials, and professionals who study and work in Geopolitics
Interesting conversation -- pervasive classroom to newsroom thinking: learn specific factoids long enough to pass the test, or feed the public's curiosity, then forget it and go on with the rest of your life vs learning to think about a subject (things to look for, or general rules to remember), or competing analysis, tools that could be useful for so much else in life. Also, the russian military used to be considered the second best in the world, but it currently seems to only be the second best in Ukraine.
You know,,, you guys have the toughest job of all,,,, you gotta talk enough BS to make losing look as good as the huge pallets of money your bosses are always seeming to make!! It must be difficult to suck your viewers into supporting these huge money making loses!!
Highly interesting discussion! Very much appreciated! Thank you, I shall listen to it twice to understand it all ( from a non- British European) Subscribing today!
I have spent a great deal of time in the former Soviet UNion and Russia, over the past 40 years...I've lived in every former Warsaw "Pact" nation and continue to live in one...My family are Czech and Polish...and you don't need to live in Russia or speak Russian to know Russian/Kremlin mentality and machinations....please do expand on your irrelevant comment.
Cool, when? Two years in you have about… 1/5th of the country and now somewhere less than 100% of your own country… 1.5 years ago you had 1/5th of their country and 100% of your own… I do not think this is going the way you want…
@@ilsagutrune2372 You still don't get it. Currently we see a cumulative effect of an attrition strategy implemented by Russians. For a long time it seems nothing changes on the map, but then we see rapid collapse. "The main object of operations should not be the territory, but the enemy's army. If the army runs out, the territory will come by itself. " Helmut von Moltke Senior. This war proved once more that old Moltke was right. Zelenskyy troops in Pokrovsk area (Pokrovsk is a key logistical hub that Zelenskyy is about to lose) mostly consist of hapless cannon fodder kidnapped off the streets. They are totally disorganized and demoralized.
amazing how ukraine using nato's tiny 3-4% of budget in military aid, is inflicting huge 3:! material losses on russia's full on war economy using 30-40% of state budget in "defense" according to the world most comprehensive and transparent open source intel with ~20,000 aggregated data points. Imagine if nato used the other 96-97%
I see you're good at math (sarcasm). 4 percent of NATO's budget is approximately the entire military budget of Russia. Add to that Ukraine's resources. It turns out that with much more NATO capabilities and Ukraine is sucking at Russian shovels. Dream of your 97 percent, nukes don't care what your GDP is.
1000 casualties a day? How factual is this? Unfortunately these analysts are still living in their own soup of assumptions about the Russian capabilities. How many times you have to be wrong before you learn that you are wrong?
Most of the casualties in a war of attrition are from artillery and long-range strikes. If Russia has preponderance in artillery and missiles by as much as 10:1, 1000 Russian casualties per day would translate to 10,0000 NATO proxy army casualties per day. These guys are clowns.
Probably just taking Russian recruitment figures of 30,000 new recruits a month at face value, observing that there does not seem to be a large scale build up of Russian troops. Putin recently announced the decision to increase the Russian armed forces by an additional 180,000 men which might indicate that their current recruitment efforts are just treading water?
@@PhiltheMoko The Russians are holding back a full 90 percent of their military, in case NATO loses its collective mind and sends troops into Ukraine. Russian casualties have been wildly exaggerated, while Ukrainian losses are now over 2,000 a day.
The sheer smugness of this crew who were complicit in the geostrategic calamity of the war in Ukraine.
Just unbelievable.
What worries me are the ones who failed to foresee the invasion, failed to foresee the results, and are failing to see the solution.
this smack of laalaa land as the basic mindscape of all those "think tanks"
Exactly, well put. 👍👍
100%. "We were thinking they are like us..." are those people exsperts? 🤪
That's a tight argument, but it doesn't quite match who said what and when. By December 2021, the US chain of command was quite certain that Russia would invade. Independent analysts might not have, but they didn't have the same HUMINT and SIGINT that the White House did. It's later the White House and the Pentagon that completely miss how the combat would play out even with months of war gone by. I think beyond gathering the intelligence, knowing what the Russian were going to do was as easy as knowing "Cindy told Robin that Brad is taking her to the dance." They tell you what they're doing. Knowing the Russian capabilities is a different issue ("Is Brad gonna get lucky?") because the Russian's themselves didn't know how bad they were.
What makes me wonder if Jake Sullivan is as dumb as a box of hammers, or just sinister, is that he's been so wrong for so long about Russia that you have to wonder why he still has a job that doesn't involve offering french fries as an option.
And also fail to estimate likelyhoods of the negative outcomes of backing a Nuclear Superpower into a corner. (If they do how much faith would you put in the estimation). There's is a strong argument that the policy preventing action deep into Russian territories against assets they deem pivotal , to be wise, at least with repect to crossing an escalotary threshold that would shred this thin mask of the war being between Ukraine and Russia. Russia certainly sees past this falsehood.
Our intellectuals/experts have become juvenile, ignorant dilettantes. This is an embarrassment if it’s an attempt at accountability and fixing the problem.
3 years in this sounds as hapless as in the beginning. Forgot nothing and learnt nothing
After working in the US, I was amazed how little my colleagues knew about the world outside the US of A.
It’s as if we don’t spend billions and billions of taxpayer money to fund intelligence agencies. Same true of the Viet Nam, Iraq, & Afghanistan invasions. “We thought they’d be like us.” The words of a clueless, belligerent narcissist.
Considering the heritage of a Nation that has plundered the resources of the Citizens who inhabited the North American Continent for thousands of Years, they should understand a Nation like Ukraine that had withstood centuries of conflicts as Empires clashed in the area?
Unfortunately, most Americans are ignorant. It's true.
or indeed the world inside the US of A.
The fact that the British and US personnel were intensively training the Ukrainian Armed Forces since 2014 show that there is a sector in the British / US military whobsaw the potential of the Ukrainians as capable to resist the Russian Army.
I wouldn’t say intense. There was training going on but intense was not the work I would use. I think we might have trained about 40k mostly national guard. Most of that training was “defensive” in nature. Often the trainers were training guys who fought 2014-16 and have said they learned more than vice versa. This is a generality. Certainly we helped but imagine if we had trained pilots, air defense crews, etc. in my opinion the commitment was the minimum to provide credible deterrence but not on the level of training we did in Middle East, not by a long shot.
@@vbcountryboy I'll piggyback on that by saying I met some of those folks in-country and it was never something that impressed me as a major commitment. I'd also add that it was a political decision before it was a military one. The training along with the Javelins that Trump was trying to hold up were first an item in a Congrassional budget before it was an programme.
We underestimated Putins will to eat the cost of invading Ukraine and we overestimated Western willingness to send billions of dollars for yet another war. Not to mention the crisis in Gaza has made every moral stand the West made in Ukraine look completely hypocritical. It's amazing to me how completely disillusioned these experts are from reality
Not just " training the Ukrainian Armed Forces", the British mercenaries directly involved in the battlefields.
@@alexhumble7653 I think most of the volunteer fighters prefer being called "volunteers". There's pay, but it's not more than E-level pay in the US. And it's certainly a lot more than British. Almost every western European country, North American, Oceania, Georgian, Belarusian... some Latin Americans (Mexicans mostly). We've quite a lot of international trainers beyond the US and UK, now, obviously. Colombian demining... It's just Ukraine is big and the forces large on both sides, so there never have been enough qualified foreign trainers or enough time.
Thought the era of Monty Python is over, but these 'cucumbers' have proved I was wrong
Zelensky - the Black Knight.
One really big factor is...there is a big elephant in the operations room. Fear, fear of those in power and operational control. That fear can translate into stunted decision-making.
🇺🇦 I agree.
Yep, the 2014-21 period was horrible, I’m not sure fear was it, some of the decisions point to collaboration with Russia. It wasn’t illegal pre 2014 and a lot of Russian money flowed into politics back then. Germany, France, Italy, etc. that had long term effects. Russia started planning this as a possible contingency, I think around 2006. So the west was politically open to malign activity without taking it seriously. When things went pear shaped in 2014, we did nothing. It set the stage for always being two steps behind the Russians. We could make that up but the fear you talk about kicks in.
I thought before the war that this would be the most colossal mistake Putin could ever make. I was in Kharkiv right before the war and people were saying they were ready to fight no matter what it takes, but most didn't think Putin would be that stupid. One make thing I can surmise in the aftermath of the full scale invasion is that we seemed not to have to asked the Baltics send Polish about the Russian mentality and how to respond. Western analysts are stuck in cold war paradigms.
You were wrong then - Putin has pretty much defeated Nato, not just Ukraine.
There was no full scale invasion - even now - Putin has always held a massive reserve in case Nato chose to enter a war directly against Russia. But instead Nato just sent its weapons (it saw how nearly a million Ukrainians were going to die so sent old tanks, trainers and missile specialists but no one to the front).
Essentially Putin has shown how superior Russian arms are to the wests, how superior the soldiers are, the tactics and ability to adjust tactics, and it has cost him some 70-100k soldiers (with maybe 15k of them from prisons).
Nato is now meaningless. The US collapse has been so unveiled that Hamas has been willing too attack Israel and the Yemenis freely attack US aircrat carriers.
It has suceeded beyond Putin's or Xi's wildest dreams.
@@antique-bs8bb "defeated nato" ... rofl. putin single handedly has caused the most explosive redevelopment of nato. literally every single european nation is now looking to pivot social spending to military spending. putin's actions in the face of non-stop options for taking the off ramp has literally led to the RE-militarization of europe....
poland 5% gdp on military spending. Germany hits 2% for first time in 30 years with €100 billion infusion in 2023 and calls for hitting 3-5% gdp to military going forward. france hit 2% nato target, and just last year macron proposed €70 billion (€495 billion over 7 years). Finland hit 2.3% of target...
All of europe is re-militarizing and you say nato is meaningless? No sir, nato *was* ... but putin has changed that.
@@antique-bs8bb you even threw in hamas conflict... buddy. where is hamas today? they literally do not exist anymore. Who is collapsing again?
You have to start a new institute - Institute of Studies of Incompetence, own incompetence. Your analytics doesn't cost much
Allah help America if these are the expert analysts at RAND shaping US foreign policy. We don’t expect Russia to do anything when we park a threat right at Russia’s vulnerable border where the last invasion towards Moscow came from
Altantic Jews Institute
Need to spend more money into these "institutes" to study this more.
Its very sad to witness this crap. at 52 minutes they still bringing up 1000 casualties a day. Like what? Are these guys really expecting us to believe that russia is in a more dire position than ukraine when it comes to man power? The side with multiples more artillery, drones, armour, ammunitions, air power, missiles etc is taking higher casualties?
They are onanistic think tank
@@andreabo6833 Perfectly put.
I just downloaded your report, and so maybe you address some of this is in there, but based on what I've heard CSIS say before, you folks seem REALLY distant from Ukraine. You seem very comfortable there off Scott Cirlce in DC. Have you been in-country and spoken to the grunts about what kind of training their getting? About how absolutely Soviet parts of the ZSU still functions?
I also don't think you have a really good handle on the Ukrainian people, culture, or economy. Talking to a handful of Ukrainians who were sent to a conference at Ramstein, and not knowing enough to genuinely challenge them on what they're saying is gone result with quite a lot of BS in the brain. I think one of the most telling things about how pathetic the Russian forces are presently is knowing how dysfunctional the Ukrainian ones are (on average).
I'm not meaning to throw blanket criticism over your work, but rather to say that the weakness in it is that you don't seem to spend any time in Ukraine itself.
I appreciate much that you can openly discuss your own failures and you want to learn from them. Chapeau bas
Looks like they are still clueless.
😂😂😂The failure is not in analytics itself, the failure is the US policy makers who where to arrogant to listen to the many reputable individuals who predicted the war, including William Burns (2008 memo).
And the most high profile one of all, John Mearsheimer.
Very good remarks on the same shaky assumptions being made right now regarding the Indo-Pacific. Looking forward to hearing more on this in the future.
I'm not surprised that so many so-called experts in academia experienced analytical failures regarding Russia's military capabilities vis-a-vis Ukraine. Russia has always started slow but over time overcame its initial difficulties. Resilience is its calling card, whether it's WWII, Chechnya or Georgia. Afghanistan was an outlier because it tried to establish a permanent presence. Even the US could not do that in the 2000s.
So you think Ukrainians are less resilient?
@@dinaf1409 Even if they are, demographics is not on their side. Men of military age are becoming more and more extinct day by day.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Still wrong. Still not learning.
They still haven't realized that they were too busy counting trees to see the wood. Russia obviously never intended to conquer Ukraine, but just to change Kiev's pro-NATO anti-Russia policy. They deliberately refrained from war and instead conducted a kid-gloves special military operation that avoided civilian deaths and left themselves vulnerable. The Istanbul negotiation made this clear.
This proposition is absurd on its face, unless by "just to change Kiev's pro-NATO anti-Russia policy" you mean they intended to assassinate Ukraine's executive government, destroy its civil society, kill its best soldiers and install pro-Kremlin puppets that would formally accept Russian annexation of Crimea and the Donbass. Its like saying someone didn't intend to commit rape, they were simply determined to have sex over their partner's objections and had to get rough. Obviously shameless.
That argument appears overlooked, they seem to want what Russia has.
Very early in the conflict, a former advisor to president Putin was on CGTN stating that the russian objective was to "crush the ukraine military". They have never deviated from this objective.
@@asc5882 Putin claimed He wanted to eliminate the Nazis.
Kyiv landed a missile on the POW camp that they had the Azov Boys in.
Zelenskyy seems to be attempting to help Kill Nazis.
Why not simply call the conflict Victoria Nuland's War?
Cos Mrs Kagan is her sister's in law
@@andreabo6833 OK then call it the New American Century War?
Because we cant have it be publicly known who (and what) caused the war.
@@Tiasung it is obvious: Putin is the aggressor!
Ps Israel has the right to defend itself
@@Tiasung The USA needs the resources under Russia, it is pretty apparent since the 1990's.
Hitler tried to appropriate Caspian Oil.
Hitler learned a lesson as Zhukov came to Berlin.
Russia saw Victoria coming 30 years ago and prepared.
I don't what to say anymore. You analysts keep saying we were wrong about Ukraine when it was you who were wrong. Why should we listen to you now?
Thisdelectable hindsight is satisfying to anyone who says today "I predicted this years ago" and no one listened. Sadly, no one important is listening now. I'm just here to say, "I care!"
Everything that happened was predicted five years ago. Everything that didn't happen was predicted five years ago too. Five years ago it's hard to tell the difference between these two groups.
Baltic States continually tried to warn the West since 2012 that Putin would try to invade Ukraine in long term stages and they did not listen. Today they finally do listen to former illegally occupied States.
As a Ukrainian, I have to say that both Serhii Plokhii and Timothy Snyder are wrong about some aspects of Ukrainian history. For a better education you should listen to the local Ukrainian historians, not the U.S. based.
Timothy Snyder is a straight propagandist, he has no interest in actual history. After all who pays for truth?
Ask all these idiots to resign!
They don;t know they are idiots. Be gentle.
Resign from what? Being a talking head?
@31:30 “we should be taking a dollop of humility every day”
Make that a large serving with every meal please! You guys really need it!
On the other hand, humble idiots are just as useless as arrogant idiots. How much are these folk being paid to talk nonsense?
They had a short glimpse at the beginning where they found out, that they didn’t ask military personnel that have dealt with ukrainian troops. In fact the Ukrainian army got schooled by western military personnel after the Donbas and Crimea occupation 2014. I think there were also many contacts with Ukrainians in Iraq, but for sure in some UN missions.
You also have military personnel of other friendly nations having a lot of contact to the Ukrainian military.
+ compare the georgian war 2008 on how the Russians performed. I thought the Russians crushed the georgians very fast, but all experts said that the Russians were shocked by their own inability and started many changes after that…
The estimates are that Ukraine has lost 600,000 dead, and 1million casualties. The Artillery ratio is 7 to 1 in favor of Russia. Russia has control of Air space without utilizing their Air superiority against Ukraine. These people with all their credentials are not serious analysts, or their ideology is so bias that makes them sound stupid.
Sure, Ivan.
When you see the name Kagan, you know a grift is afoot. They are always wrong in their predictions, spectacularly so, and are punished by having money shot at them with a firehose.
Looks like these people are paid to be wrong, they are so proud about being wrong...
CSIS is an other American institution with just a American view of things that happened in February 2022. The first words that came out of the mouth of the first speaker was that at February 2022 was a full scale invasion. Now if you see that Russia used 60.000 troops by this invasion you can hardly call it a ful scale invasion. Furthermore whil the Istanbul agreement was negotiated, ukraine ask for russia to pull back to the border . Ukraine betrayed the Russians after Boris Johnson visited kiev in April 2022. Now I got to question the neutrality of the participants of this debate or better propaganda talks. Well done but nobody with more then one braincell know this is just nato rhetoric.
My take on deficiencies on this (w/o reading the paper) is the general lack of basic scientific scientific tenets. Ingrained biases are present in all analysis today. I predicted the war in public in 2008 as an American living in Ukraine. I received a poor reception from both US A and Ukrainians. I repeatedly punched my fist in the years leading up to the 2022 conflict on how wrong we were wrong. The USA failed Ukraine because of these assumptions. Ukraine was blocked from purchasing systems that could have prevented this horrible war. People look at Russia like it’s the Soviet Union, they fail to understand how important Ukraine was to what little success the CCCP had.
Do you think they really care?
Honestly that’s a good question, if you mean the “experts” or intel analysts I would like to believe that some do. However, those that don’t should. This wars outcome will shape Americas future too.
@@vbcountryboy Yes because increasing escalation with Russia on their existential fears of US/NATO starting the next nuclear Operation Barbarossa will doom all of America into a nuclear holocaust where most of it's cities will end up like Hiroshima instead of pushing the alliance back to Poland. This war should be the final lesson in American folly before they bankrupt themselves as the US dollar goes down. Maybe this war will teach the US the limits of US power, stop the delusion of unipolarity and make the nation focus more on the corruption at home, the wealth disparity that has completely eroded democracy into oligarchy, the over-arching security state it has become overrun by bureaucrats and thinktanks and for a start revert back to the pragmatism back in the Cold War where US power/greed was checked/limited by the USSR/WP.
What were your arguments back in the time?
Not expert analysts but lobbyists
All these extremely educated well fed analysts. What do they know about anything?
The war was lost once Ukraine resisted.
That's some big brain thinking there, congrats.
they will lose it attrition war.
@@neolord50pro77 it has already lost: even if the military actions ended today, Ukraine would no longer be viable: millions of citizens would not return, not from Russia, not from the EU countries, industry has been destroyed (the war has nothing to do with it, it was destroyed by the Maidan government, deliberately, since 2014), energy has been destroyed, agriculture has been destroyed - the fields are strewn with depleted uranium - which the Ukrainians were very happy about, by the way.
Commendable and necessary. Thank you.
They are stunningly ignorant of history.
Analytic failure of Russia underestimating how much NATO already had weaponized Ukraine and the analyitic failure of underestimating how resilient Russia fends off and outproduces the combined West.
CSIS should do a follow up with those independent analysts (eg John Mearshimer and Scott Ritter amongst the few) who got it right and why so
...
I know Dr Phillips O'Brein, great strategists, very excited discussion, I thanked all CSIS team and host and our respected and honorable guests. Thanks.
Glad they talked about their failures in combat. But not respected. Not glad they put their pride above their truth.
A non soldier discusses war
In a non orator’s voice
Troll farm response is all over the comment section.
It deserves to be. That discussion was smug fatuous nonsense from start to finish.
Anyone would think Ukraine was winning the war listening to these halfwits.
I like these people, not lording their intelligence over each other but sharing to the group their perspective, they keep saying “ if I may…” when they want to speak, quite refreshing
It's not Jerry Lewis ... it's not Norm McDonald ... it's not even a bad Chevy Chase ... but it's still kinda funny.
This discussion is just a bunch of pro-Western Russophobic "analysts" sharing their "expertise" about the Ukrainian war.
At one point, one of the "experts" says:
"We did not expect that Putin would act irrationally and invade Ukraine"
(or words to that effect)
The common thread in the discussion seems to be:
The west overestimated the capabilities of the Russian military.
The west underestimated the capabilities of the Ukrainian military.
The discussion is just a rehash of the western myth:
Plucky little Ukraine punching above its weight and defeating the evil Russians.
This is the reality of the origins of the Ukrainian war (which is NOT discussed by the "experts"):
The war in Ukraine was caused by a United States attempt to turn Ukraine into a NATO BANTUSTAN from which the Russian heartland could be constantly threatened.
Russia will NEVER tolerate NATO expansion into Ukraine. Period. Full Stop.
You can agree or disagree with the Russian position that NATO expansion into Ukraine poses a vital threat to Russian security. But the fact remains: That IS THE RUSSIAN POSITION.
The Americans knew full well that Russia would never tolerate NATO expansion into Ukraine.
CIA Director William Burns was US Ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008.
Burns was told by many different Russians in no uncertain terms that NATO expansion into Ukraine was a REDLINE that the Russians would not tolerate.
Burns wrote a memo to his superiors in Washington D.C.
The title of the memo was: NYET MEANS NYET. (NO MEANS NO).
The memo summarized the talks Burns had with different Russians: NATO expansion into Ukraine is a redline that the Russians will not tolerate.
Nevertheless, the Bush Administration in 2008 announced that NATO would expand into Ukraine.
Since 2008 the Obama administration continued the plan of NATO expansion into Ukraine.
In 2010 Viktor Yanukovych was elected President of Ukraine.
The Yanukovych administration pursued a course of friendly relations with Russia and refused NATO expansion into Ukraine. For this policies, the United States engineered a coup d'etat against Yanukovych in 2014. Yanukovych was overthrown.
Victoria Nuland from the Obama State Department paraded around the Maidan square handing out cookies to the Ukrainian ultra nationalists involved in the Maidan square event. Nuland was taped discussing who should be the next Ukrainian president. The United States has had VETO POWER when it comes to selecting the next Ukrainian president ever since Maidan.
Ukraine today is a NATO BANTUSTAN. It depends on Western economic, diplomatic and military aid for its survival.
The idea that NATO membership is worth the destruction and loss of life that Ukraine has experienced is absurd.
There is only ONE WINNER in the Ukraine war: The United States.
The United States managed to corral the European Union into imposing sanctions against Russia in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The European Union has been reduced to a proxy of the US State Department when it comes to its policy towards Ukraine.
Germany used to buy cheap Russian natural gas through the Baltic sea pipelines.
When the US blew up the pipeline, it dealt a crippling blow to Germany.
Preach! Well said
Is your last name Peskov?
The initial comment is a perfect example of how Russian propagada works.
@@ГлебВерховский-п2рyup. Far more articulated than typical propaganda b0t$ but still. Never the less, this is the actual Russian position, rational or not.
Bullshit. This is pure Russian propaganda. Pretending that poor little russia had no choice but to attack Ukraine. Putin is a megalomaniac trying to reconstitute "greater Russia" and all your bs is just deflection.
The comparer articulation skills are almost painful to hear.
What is clear to me after this discussion is Russia never really wanted to conquer Ukraine. It really was a special millitary operation. West made it into a big regional war, almost an existential one for Europe, in order to isolate and punish Russia.
An element of Continuation of American hegemony ober Europe can also not be discounted
Spot on.
At Istanbul, Ukraine had a choice. Suffer relatively few losses, forswear NATO and recognise the Russian speakers of the Donbass/Crimeas right to self-determination.
Or, reject Russias offer and turn Ukraine into a charnel house.
Zelensky chose the latter.
Main problem with their assessment, is they think like Americans and not like Russians. Completely different set a values these days.
So you just presented a circcular argument which is an illogical fallacy?
Talking heads… They never understood the real reason and they still don’t get it. Talk for the purpose of talking…
Might as well throw some chicken guts on the floor and read the entrails to predict the future.
This are the strategies we have now? And they are funded by the pentagon 😮
Trump would have gone to sleep five minutes into that very interesting discussion. God help us all after the 5th November ...
It’s such a BS that intelligences didn’t have access to assess the level of Ukrainian army or training. We had a huge volunteer movement among both the military and civilians. They were quite vocal about the army as an institution. Most of all, all the modern approaches like the use of drone reconnaissance and software for artillery precision came from the volunteer units. Even a proper analysis of open sources would’ve sufficed if the Western analysts didn’t operate on some outdated assumptions.
you goona lose
In light of actual reality, selfmedication is sorely needed,
it cannot be easy, it must be learned , only the exceptional can practice it at this sophisticated level - a jawdropper...
IMHO, when analysts look at other military’s they compare it to their own. The analyst are also from the officer class who have little if any experience with enlisted rank requirements. The technology now demands highly trained enlisted personnel to use and repair equipment. No matter how good your equipment is if you don’t use it to its potential and able to repair after use it becomes a lump of metal.
Seething nerds playing dungeons and dragons with strangers lives.
Go watch scott ritter the kiddy diddler
@@martincerny3294 I’m watching your moms OnlyFans instead. 🤪
@@martincerny3294 I’m watching your moms OnlyFans instead. 🤪
@@martincerny3294 oh look how the war nerds take down comments.
100% they are all jews
The estimate of Russian reaction was based far too much on calling Russian bluff because the USA and UK intelligence services really didn’t believe Russia would cross into Ukraine because they had folded before.
Yes it is true Ukraine military forces fought well in the first year until they fell upon Russian prepared defences in the North and South of Ukraine following the initial land grab as Russian forces moved back.
These top trained forces got bloody nosed and required 10 months to train replacements for the June offensive where they were destroyed following mobile warfare systems. These tactics do not allow for aerial relaying of cleared minefields cutting off attacking forces from there resupply lines. Defences in six line depth have never seen an attack attempted against a peer enemy
Appreciated this conversation immensely.
Why ? It's smug nonsense from start to finish.
Neo Con warmongers at play. This war could have been avoided easily - simply by respecting Russia's legitimate concerns for their security.
Russian trolling in fact or effect.
The only legitimate security concern for Russia is that a corrupt autocracy will perform poorly compared to a reforming democratic neighbor state.
Invasion isn't a legitimate response.
If they're paying you to publish this kind of crap, they're paying you too much.
Of course, the Russian for “legitimate concerns” would be paranoia in any other language. How else to explain the world’s largest country since at least 1700 blowing up a period of prosperity every other generation for the compulsion to conquer yet more Eurasian wasteland? (Full of peoples prone to rebellion that frankly aren’t worth the cost of keeping down. If productive Muscovites subsidizing Ramzan Kadyrov’s cosplay khanate-and occasionally getting shot by him-is what winning the Chechen war looks like, how could losing have been any more humiliating?)
On the bright side, the lasting result of this whole conflict, wherever the frontline ends up, is something the Russians, Americans, French, British, and Poles can all get behind: Knocking Germany down to size! Together we defeated Hitler, and together we defeated the smug parasitic superiority of Merkel’s export-led growth model.
@@christopherrubicam4474 Hmmm....that's a really bad joke. Ukraine in 2022 was the most corrupt country in Europe with a democracy that only functioned when the US allowed it. That was illustrated nicely when the US (with the assistance of a Kagan-in-law Victoria Nuland) helped overthrow an elected government. That trick triggered a civil war. The Ukrainian army was largely territorial so the units stationed in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk kept their uniforms but changed patches. What was left of the Ukrainian Army charges in and promptly gets trapped - with Minsk I saving their bacon, followed by Minsk II. Pity the security guarantees on those agreements by Germany and France were bogus.
This is a civil war. The people living in the areas now hosting the RF forces want to be part of the RF and want no part of Kiev. (Can you blame them? Ukraine is poor, corrupt and has the lowest population replacement rate in Europe. And they host proto-fascist militias - condemned by the West until February 2022.) Unlike most citizens of the leader of the "rules based international order" I have been watching developments in Ukraine for years. Let's see - how do we put this simply? NATO members may well host US forces and US nuclear weapons - you will find them in Romania, Poland and Germany. Russia's border with Ukraine is huge and Moscow didn't want US forces there or in the Black Sea.
Of course there's always the matter of sovereignty. After 1991 Ukraine was a sovereign state. NATO is made up of sovereign states. So if Ukraine applies to NATO and NATO members agree, well, the deal is done and democracy wins again. We've gone through this before after all. In 1962, Cuba, a sovereign state with good reason to fear attack by the US, asked the USSR - another sovereign state - to station nuclear weapons in their homeland. And the US, a respecter of sovereignty, plunged the world to the brink of Armageddon to prevent having potentially hostile nukes on their border. But it's ok if the US does it.
And the integrity of national borders - very important. Of course in the late 90s NATO partitioned Serbia by force of arms on the basis of self-determination. And they helped start the Syrian Civil War to .... protect Syria from ISIS? And they demolished Libya ... I guess because they could. And let's see, how many countries have hosted US armed forces at war since I've been politically aware....Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq - I bet I've missed some place. (As I recall, we have diplomatic relations with the PRC. If so, that means we recognize the "One China" policy. And if that's true why are we selling sophisticated arms to Taiwan and preparing for a naval war in the Pacific? We wouldn't want China to get uppity in the South China Sea would we. Wonder why they call it the South China Sea?)
I'm not a Russian troll. I teach and write history for a living. Facing the truth is part of the job. Right now the US is a danger to world peace. And all to keep the US in the position of the "indispensable nation" and sole superpower. Breaks my heart watching a country that once did stand for freedom turn into what we opposed just to remain a hegemon.
Elliot Cohen of all people. Its baffling that someone would look at his track record and then hire him.
First of all, it’s a great conversation, and I love the honesty and acceptance. It’s been a great talk.
However, I disagree with a few points. Let's start with what you said. Yes, we made mistakes on two fronts: first, believing there would be no war, and second, thinking Russia would simply overpower Ukraine because of their numbers and experience. We thought it would be like other conflicts we’ve seen.
Why do I disagree?
First of all, I also made the mistake of thinking there would be no invasion. But on the second point, I believe overestimating Russia was incorrect, and here's why:
This war wasn't planned in 2022; the CIA, MI6, and NATO had been preparing for it since 2014. They knew it was coming. We have to acknowledge how well their strategy was developed-they knew exactly how Russia would attack and how to respond. It was incredibly well-planned.
Plus, it’s not just Ukraine fighting-NATO is providing intelligence and ammunition, making it a proxy NATO war. So, do you think it’s just Ukraine, or is it really NATO fighting through them?
Also, if you are well-prepared to defend with a strong intelligence team, you are bound to lose fewer people.
Russia made a huge mistake by underestimating Ukraine. Never take an enemy lightly, no matter how small. Russia initially came in with bad plans, trying to overwhelm Ukraine. But NATO’s intelligence must have had counterstrategies in place, which is why Russia lost so many weapons, aircraft, and men.
But then, by 2023, Russia learned from its mistakes and started acting more carefully. You have to understand that Russia is not just facing Ukraine, but also proxy NATO forces and mercenaries. While Russia had to face sanctions and limited access to weapons, Ukraine had support from around 30 countries supplying weapons and resources.
Wars is fought with men and ammunitions, and Ukraine was getting supply of ammunation from west .
I think Russia has shown incredible resilience and strength against proxy NATO forces.
"Russia had to face sanctions and limited access to weapons."
You'll be heartbroken then at all the Russian, North Korean and Iranian munitions that have just been destroyed en-masse at various ammo depots in Russia.
Who else do you think should be sending Russia arms and mercenaries to help?
@@bakedbean37 First ,why should I be heartbroken?
2nd Russia started getting wepaons very late unlike Ukraine which was getting support from 2014.
3rd Western wepaon are precision weapon highly sophisticated but Iran and N. Korea is not match
4th The biggest factor in this war is intellignce specially US haa cutting edge spy sattelite aa huge factor
5)The technology from 30 Nations such as Germany,France UK ,,US Canada and many others vs technology from just one country as in Russian ..
Every country is unique let's say Swedish good ith radars drones french good with precision etc etc ..that is huge factor .
6)What no one is talking about many global companies helping Ukraine in many ways
7h and golden rule :: If you build youre defensive position very strong (Ukraine. With NATO did this )
The whole world knows about listening post around Ukraine air defense etc ,the loss of men would be very less while trh attacking position had to suffer huge loss .
Russia was fighting a proxy NATO not Ukraine from the day one
Tell me one thingh if you are honest are special forces from some countries were operating as merccennirre or not.
Tell military engineering unit from many countries were operating or not?
Tell me was Britain team not actively involved in hittting Russain navy or not.
How do most missiles operate are they not using US satellites...
Tell me something how many billions have been given to Ukraine. For arms and men.
So even with all this factors small Ukraine fighting Ruussia really .
It's proxy NATO. vs Russian..
Ukraine is getting large quantities of manpower from NATO countries?
@@PhiltheMoko Thank you !!
@@arzoo_singh it was a question, did you see the question mark?
I find it quite odd that the panel reports many analysts did not ask the question about the effect of corruption on Russian military. Given the trope in news media over decades about how corrupt Soviet then Russian society was, as an average person I would ask that question, how then were the experts so limited in their focus?
Have you ever considered you analyzed under false assumptions about the initial war goals of the Russians. You follow blindly the western narrative that Putin wanted to annex the ukrain all along, and that deterring Nato expansion played no role
deterring NATO expansion? Are you sure he wasn't just trying to reconstitute the old Russian empire?
@@7scientist Yes, you are right, an invasion force of less than 200,000 men is more than enough to occupy the largest country in Europe and restore the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. Your teachers can be proud of you, they raised a genius!
These speakers are part of the machine of the western narrative,they have not one unbias bone in their body,these are the same people who helped to start the war.
How did deterring NATO expansion go? Hope no more countries with capable militaries joined since the war started? Was there a clause in the NATO charter that forbid countries with active border disputes (like the one in the Donbas) from joining?
False assumptions? Even the russians themselve don't know their war goals as was openly stated by russian propagandists on TV (Margarita Simonyan)
This discussion is a complete failure.
It's nothing but a delusional
Russophobic circle-jerk.
Thanks genius
@@martincerny3294 I'm here for the idiots. You're welcome! 👍
@@darrellbryant1018 When liars discuss lies, of course it will not bear any fruit.
Eliot Cohen says RU experience in syria is bombing civilians so no experience in terms of battle hardened. Is this the same eliot who says the opposite when isreal bombs civilians? cant be the same guy
The main strem media now is very little critical to what they post/send. There is alot of underestemating of peoples abilitys to stand up and fight for their people/country! Im from Europe btw and was invaded in WW2.
maybe its just ne, but what are they actually trying to share? that they all miscalculated Russia's actions? that moderator, she's way too tense😊
You know what they say, "Russia is never as strong as she seems, and is never as weak as she seems".
Why isn't there a link here to a pdf of the report itself?
Politics.
They want you to buy it
Can you imagine the nightmare of trying to find something on your own!!!
@@meganthrasher6212 It's a free download in PDF format. Also mentioned in the video.
The bots are out in force, I sense someone's fear, enjoy the free engagement.
At the beginning of the war the pentagon generals were all saying ukraine would drive out Russia in 3 weeks
When do you predict the Taiwan war is going to start?
Obsessed with PR and media hype Zelenskyy is in DC, so hapless Ukrainian cannon fodder in Vuhledar is doomed. As usual officers already left Vuhledar leaving hapless cannon fodder behind. With such a staggering rate of losses, Zelenskyy thugs are struggling to kidnap off the streets enough even for simple replacement, to say nothing about the quality and motivation of this hapless cannon fodder.
Maybe they can last till November 2024 elections, the Western world goes in US election cycles. Maybe Americans will pull another Afghanistan one day just give up and move on and pretend it never happened.
Nice ruZZian trolling attempt. I am surprise you didn't try to say Zelenskyy was driving his new Lamborghini to New York or staying on his new yacht in harbor, FFS.
@37:00 This is actually a very important point. Why is it that when presenting a complex topic like war and international relations, Networks aren't looking to have complex and nuanced views discussed? Sure clicks and views are important but on a 24 hour news cycle there is so much time for actual discussions and educating the public.
When was this taped because Ukraine has been devastated because of this war. These people are acting like Ukraine is winning. This is delusional
oh you should see the other guy then!
exactly these are the weird jews that started the war and are its weird architects these people think they are smart, but nobody likes them
When you're fighting a defensive war against a much larger enemy, survival is victory. No one acts like America won the Vietnam war, even though the death and destruction were way more lopsided.
Who won the Vietnam war?
@claudinefiona9698 LOL - go tell Putin to rescue Kursk in 1 day not 3 days.
the only failure here is the "west" is still thinking and acting like it's 1990's 😂😂
When the West financially bailed out Russia’s financial abyss, thinking that they made a new puppy friend.
@@Espiritu-o7xbailed? Don't be so naive.
@@Espiritu-o7x Really? Western advisors told us how to carry out reforms in Russia that ultimately failed. At a key moment, the West did not give money. The West supported people who said that Russia did not need machine tools and factories, because everything could be bought in the West. With such friends you don't need enemies.
@@Espiritu-o7x The only mistake was that they thought that Russia is a normal state, not a dystopian oligarchic hellscape.
@@martincerny3294the only mistake was that the Russians at the point bought the BS from the west, only to slowly realize they would never be accepted and treated as Europeans and that US will always need sizable enemy to fearmonger
Same bias when CSIS analysis potential Taiwan conflict
Grateful for this long-awaited, insightful document; footnotes/appendices included. Tim Snyder rightly laments academic favour of social sciences over the humanities? Where have economic & social history, as well as geography (topography, climate, demography) been factored into received wisdom? Kitchen sink methodology perhaps, but did any "experts" bother to watch "The Servant of the People" and reflect on its themes? Surely history teacher, landslide elected, President Goloborodko would have made that selfie video on 26 February 2022 - albeit with a few bleeps.
The even bigger failure was instigating failure of the Istanbul talks in the belief that Russia’s army was absolutely rotten and could be easily beaten. The cost in Ukrainian lives and treasure has been a horrendous tragedy.
This is a basic misunderstanding of what took place at the beginning of the invasion.
Refer to this cogent comment
I've gone down this rabbit hole deeply (There are long interviews about these peace talks with people in the know with various claims, Arakhamia, Naftali Bennet, Ex Ambassador Chalyi)
What I think is that Putin is massively overselling the degree to which Russia and Ukraine were willing to accept mutual terms ignoring western influence.
There has never been a deal put forward where anyone has claimed that Russia was willing to simply vacate the annexed territories minus Crimea (and why would they?)
We know that to this day, Ukraine still is not willing to accept the annexed portions of the Donbass as Russian, so why would they be willing to do this 2 months after the war when they were having successes on the battlefield?
Boris Johnson, by the way, is claimed to have ended the peace deal after two months of deliberation that did not deliver on anything specific. It isn't like he killed a nascent deal.
Next, Putin's own narrative about this literally doesn't make sense (but it doesn't have to in the current soundbite/social media climate).
He more or less states that he invaded Ukraine for at least 3 reasons
Some convoluted historical grievance argument going back unironically 1000 years
To denazify Ukraine
Because NATO
Why would he then want peace without rectifying any of those problems?? On point #3, 90% of Ukrainians now want to join NATO.
So his narrative is essentially, we had to invade for these reasons, but we totally wanted peace soon after even though none of the reasons for invasion have been dealt with.
Why would Ukraine want to sign away 15% of their country after early successes and having 0 trust in Russia?
Then there is the fact that the UK and US don't actually have much leverage to force Ukraine to fight. The US couldn't even get the grifting Afghan government that was massively benefitting from the US to fight against the Taliban, a much weaker foe. Whatever leverage the US has over Ukraine is infinitely less than what the US had over the ANA, and they still collapsed quickly.
Say Ukraine really wanted to sign the "peace deal" that probably would have included officially and immediately giving away ~15% of their country. What could the US do to stop this? Zelensky has been stalwart and has basically gone on tours around the world constantly begging for weapons and the US literally offered to help him flee the country on the onset of the war but he chose to stand his ground and fight.
Arakhamia, the head of the Ukrainian delegation, also stated in an interview that the west only advised and the final decision was Ukraine's.
This narrative is bullshit on so many levels, not to mention that even if there was a "peace deal" that it would not be some panacea that people are characterizing it as. There would be ZERO guarantee that such a deal wouldn't just lead to a further conflict 4 or 5 years later.
Oh look at that, another russian liar. Nobody instigated failure, that's completely false and you know it
Russia made it fail in the belief thay its army was absolutely brilliant. How desperate is Ivan today that he has to bash himself to try to blame America!
Russia's demands at Istanbul were essentially a Ukrainian capitulation. Only liars pretend like peace was a realistic option.
Ok Ivan 😂
A bunch of narcissistic amateurs who don’t understand either Russia or Ukraine.
An enormous amount of waffle and not saying much. Ps. Russia initial invasion was simply to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table, which it did. Then the US and UK scuppered the deal that was reached and then a full scale war ensued. By the way Ukraine has lost this war.
If Ukraine has lost the war, why do Russian ammo dumps keep exploding?
@@johnschwartz1641 Russia has thousands of ammo dumps and a massive production output. How does taking out a few ammo dumps win you a war?
@@FrancoisMouton-iu7jt I never said Ukraine had won already, only that they haven't yet lost. They're still in the fight, and the ammo dumps are visible proof of that.
Wars aren't about being bigger and stronger - they're about achieving strategic goals. Russia has not yet achieved its strategic goals. Given NATO expansion into Sweden and Finland, they've had a major strategic setback.
@@johnschwartz1641 yo Johnny do the thing that you answer every single comment that bursts the bubble in your head, we sure will not take you for the empty head zealot that you are.
@@johnschwartz1641 Speaking of achieving strategic goals Ukraine unlike Russia stated their goals and that is regaining 1991 borders and expelling Russian army from the Ukraine. So keep that in mind because by their own definition Ukraine is losing right now.
Blinded by ideology
great and insightful discussion, thank you
Henry Kissinger's comment comes to mind about how it can be dangerous to be America's enemy but fatal to be her friend.
Very enlightening talk. Thanks for the video. Want more of the same!
This talk doesn't have a satisfying conclusion. It's basically we were wrong because of our biases, we need to do better. They only thing I see from this is that the biases will be over corrected into opposite direction
Who funded the study? Why was it funded? In whose interest is the study? Who are the intended audiences of this study
They have a Wiki, there's no reason to ask seemingly provocative questions when they can all be answered with a simple Google search.
They're an American Think Tank, it's not that deep.
@@TSZatoichithe point of the question is to ask the casual observer to look a bit deeper
Its an American Strategic think tank. Why are you even asking those questions lol? The audience is people in other think tinks, USA military, USA gov/intelligence, officials, and professionals who study and work in Geopolitics
Always important questions to ask yourself, regardless of the topic.
@@Doomer1984what kind of causal observer is coming to watch a bunch of academics do an hour long talk on strategic analysis failure?
Samuel Chaparal is still at Rand isn't he? What lessons has he learned?
Here's to world peace... ha ha ha. ... that was a SERIOUS comment
Interesting conversation -- pervasive classroom to newsroom thinking: learn specific factoids long enough to pass the test, or feed the public's curiosity, then forget it and go on with the rest of your life vs learning to think about a subject (things to look for, or general rules to remember), or competing analysis, tools that could be useful for so much else in life.
Also, the russian military used to be considered the second best in the world, but it currently seems to only be the second best in Ukraine.
Her nose tells all.
How do you get access to the report?
Csis website
Recall, these "experts" were telling us that Ukraine was winning the whole time.
I watch the warplane footage's, but people are dying... This war must end, NOW!!!!!!
You know,,, you guys have the toughest job of all,,,, you gotta talk enough BS to make losing look as good as the huge pallets of money your bosses are always seeming to make!! It must be difficult to suck your viewers into supporting these huge money making loses!!
care to expand with something coherent and substantial...rather than just poorly used punctuation
Hahaha ... Ditto!
@@ldhorrickshe said it all in a nutshell. What are you confused about? NATO has cost the lives of over 450k Ukrainian citizens.
@@V12F1Demon oh ya, i forgot, that NATO invaded Ukraine and not Russia
Now this comment is like a good Chevy Chase!
Highly interesting discussion! Very much appreciated! Thank you, I shall listen to it twice to understand it all ( from a non- British European) Subscribing today!
Do any of these analysts speak Russian? No? Have any of them lived in Russia? No?
Irrelevant. Nazi Germany was defeated not by those who had lived there.
@@tivorum Thats a bad example because Nazi Germany was defeated by Russians lol and some of them were indeed living on occupied territories.
What's the point of this question? :D Can you expand on this deep thought?
@@martincerny3294 of course not because its an utterly erroneous comment
I have spent a great deal of time in the former Soviet UNion and Russia, over the past 40 years...I've lived in every former Warsaw "Pact" nation and continue to live in one...My family are Czech and Polish...and you don't need to live in Russia or speak Russian to know Russian/Kremlin mentality and machinations....please do expand on your irrelevant comment.
Nyet meant nyet.
My guess that it will be very difficult to predict the direction of this war , or if there will be a conclusion . . .
ISW stated quite authoritatively that Vugledar lost its strategic importance tonight and the same fate awaits Pokrovsk, Dnipro, Kiev and Lviv.
Cool, when? Two years in you have about… 1/5th of the country and now somewhere less than 100% of your own country… 1.5 years ago you had 1/5th of their country and 100% of your own… I do not think this is going the way you want…
@@ilsagutrune2372 You still don't get it. Currently we see a cumulative effect of an attrition strategy implemented by Russians. For a long time it seems nothing changes on the map, but then we see rapid collapse. "The main object of operations should not be the territory, but the enemy's army. If the army runs out, the territory will come by itself. " Helmut von Moltke Senior. This war proved once more that old Moltke was right. Zelenskyy troops in Pokrovsk area (Pokrovsk is a key logistical hub that Zelenskyy is about to lose) mostly consist of hapless cannon fodder kidnapped off the streets. They are totally disorganized and demoralized.
amazing how ukraine using nato's tiny 3-4% of budget in military aid, is inflicting huge 3:! material losses on russia's full on war economy using 30-40% of state budget in "defense" according to the world most comprehensive and transparent open source intel with ~20,000 aggregated data points. Imagine if nato used the other 96-97%
I see you're good at math (sarcasm). 4 percent of NATO's budget is approximately the entire military budget of Russia. Add to that Ukraine's resources. It turns out that with much more NATO capabilities and Ukraine is sucking at Russian shovels. Dream of your 97 percent, nukes don't care what your GDP is.
I cannot help but think that the myth of the "Red Army" played a big role in the thinking around this.
1000 casualties a day? How factual is this? Unfortunately these analysts are still living in their own soup of assumptions about the Russian capabilities. How many times you have to be wrong before you learn that you are wrong?
Straight from that neutral objective source called Ukrainian intelligence at face value..
Most of the casualties in a war of attrition are from artillery and long-range strikes. If Russia has preponderance in artillery and missiles by as much as 10:1, 1000 Russian casualties per day would translate to 10,0000 NATO proxy army casualties per day. These guys are clowns.
Probably just taking Russian recruitment figures of 30,000 new recruits a month at face value, observing that there does not seem to be a large scale build up of Russian troops. Putin recently announced the decision to increase the Russian armed forces by an additional 180,000 men which might indicate that their current recruitment efforts are just treading water?
@@thomasbenian4701 there just outright liars that's who they are,they have no integrity they are paid stooges.
@@PhiltheMoko
The Russians are holding back a full 90 percent
of their military, in case NATO loses its collective
mind and sends troops into Ukraine.
Russian casualties have been wildly exaggerated,
while Ukrainian losses are now over 2,000 a day.
Why don’t u guys cut the first 2 mins out
because they need to plug their own publication, that's the whole point of this, duh