A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
As the U.S. pauses that weapons shipment to Ukraine, Russia is claiming new gains in the war. Russia says it now controls all of Luhansk, a key region in eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian officials have not confirmed that.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
To hear more about what may be happening, we've called Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a top analyst of Russian military strategy. Mr. Kofman, welcome. Thanks so much for joining us.
MICHAEL KOFMAN: Yeah, thanks for having on your program.
MARTIN: So Russia claims to have taken full control of Luhansk. Do we know if that's true? And does it actually change the situation on the ground?
KOFMAN: I don't think that's true. But Russia has controlled most of Luhansk oblast for quite a while. And in truth, it doesn't change much on the ground at this point.
MARTIN: How come?
KOFMAN: So the reality is that Russia has been prosecuting a slow and grinding advance. In fact, over the past several years, Russia has had the advantage on the battlefield. But if you look at their overall military performance, they've woefully underperformed. And they're still quite a ways away from their objectives. The focus of their campaign is to take the rest of Donetsk and they're still quite a ways away from that. I think that Russian advances have been incremental and quite costly. But that being said, we do see once again this year an acceleration of Russian offensive effort from the spring going into the summer.
MARTIN: How has Russia been able to achieve these gains and can they sustain them?
KOFMAN: So Russia has a very significant advantage in manpower. They're able to replace their losses and they keep generating new formations. They also have a material advantage. And so the way they've been fighting is essentially trying to grind or press their way through the front. Ukrainian forces have worked very hard to counter the way the Russian military has been fighting by expanding drone units and trying to make it very hard for Russian forces to advance, particularly to get to their infantry at the front line. Well, that being said, the Russian military can still sustain this for some time. And it's clear that even though they are running up against deficits of equipment, they're likely to keep pushing at least until the winter of this coming year. And it's not clear that the war will end at all in 2025.
MARTIN: So talk about Ukraine for a minute. Ukraine, as we've seen, they've spent a lot of energy striking deep inside Russia with drones and with sabotage. What effect has that had? And I do want to ask whether that's in a way made them more vulnerable on the front lines as well.
KOFMAN: So both Russia and Ukraine have expanded strike campaigns against each other, critical infrastructure and military targets. On the one hand, you see that the Russian drone strike campaign has increased significantly in number of drones and cruise missiles that they're launching into Ukraine. On the other hand, you've seen a significant expansion of Ukrainian strikes against Russian defense industry, Russian energy industry and more recently, certain special types of operations, like Operation Spiderweb by Ukrainian SBU Alpha, which basically targeted Russian long-range aviation. So they do have an effect, certainly on suppressing defense industrial mobilization, production. The net effect is hard to gauge, to be very honest with you, as both sides are able to sustain this war. And these are both fairly large countries and they're quite resilient.
MARTIN: You know, the U.S. has paused some weapon shipments to Ukraine, they say because of concerns about the stockpile. How does that affect things right now?
KOFMAN: This looks like a rather small shipment, and it seems to be a big process foul that's taking place somewhere inside the U.S. government. That said, this specific shipment is not going to be deterministic of anything. And I don't think it's going to significantly affect things for Ukraine. The bigger issue is that if this is the beginning of a much larger policy of suspending or holding back certain types of munitions for Ukraine, that will most definitely have an effect as we get later into the fall. And that, to me, would look very problematic.
MARTIN: So before we let you go, just give us a sense of kind of the broader trajectory of this war. And what do you see as the chances of one side or the other coming to the table for peace talks?
KOFMAN: Sure. So if we look at the trajectory this year, although Russia's advantaged, it's not able to convert that advantage into decisive gains on the battlefield. And Ukrainian lines, while not stable, are also not likely to collapse in the near future. So the situation for Ukraine is not terrible, but it's also not great. However, if we look at the fighting from a more strategic perspective, at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter who controls the next 10 or 20 kilometers of Donetsk.
What the fighting really does is it informs both sides about their prospects on the battlefield, and most importantly, their negotiating positions. And the thing that's in question is what is more sustainable or less sustainable, Russian offensive effort in Ukraine or the Ukrainian defensive effort? That fundamentally sets up both sides for potential negotiations down the line. Some hope they'll come back to it in the fall. I'm increasingly skeptical that that's going to take place. And I think that this war is going to drag on into 2026.
MARTIN: That is Michael Kofman, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Kofman, thank you so much for sharing these insights with us.
KOFMAN: Thanks for having on the program. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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