Future Security Forum: What are the Lessons of the War in Ukraine?

Panelists:

SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN, DPhil,

Emeritus Professor of War Studies, King's College London

DAVID KILCULLEN, PhD,

Professor of International and Political Studies, University of New South Wales Canberra, and Professor of Practice Arizona State University

ROB LEE, Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Research Institute, Phd candidate, King's College London

CANDACE RONDEAUX, Director, Future Frontlines, New America, Professor of Practice Arizona State University

Moderated by PETER SINGER, PhD, New America, Professor of Practice Arizona State University

Transcript:

PETER BERGEN: Our next conversation is "What are the lessons of the war in Ukraine?" One lesson seems to be: Don't invade Ukraine.

This panel showcases our partnership, the PLuS Alliance between Arizona State, King's College London, University of New South Wales. The panel will be moderated by Peter Singer, PhD. Peter is a strategist and senior fellow at New America, professor of practice at Arizona State. Over to you, Peter.

PETER SINGER: Thank you, Peter Bergen, and very much also want to add my thanks to the organizers and everybody working the back end of this, and particularly, I want to thank them because I am someone who works in the "What if?" And earlier today I posted on social media the question, "What if you could ask some of the world's leading experts in warfare about what is going on in Ukraine?" and I have that honor, that ability to do that today.

And we've assembled just a fantastic panel. We're joined first by Sir Lawrence Freedman. He's Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London. He's been described as the "Dean of British Strategic Studies," and he's the author of multiple renowned books, including most relevant to our discussion his amazingly timed new book, "Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine."

We're also joined by David Kilcullen. He's a professor of International and Political Studies at the University of New South Wales and also a fellow professor of practice at Arizona State University. Dave is an Australian Army veteran. He's an entrepreneur, a business founder, and he's the author of six books, including my personal favorite, "The Accidental Guerrilla."

Next, we've got Rob Lee. Rob is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Research Institute, a former U.S. Marine infantry officer. He's a PhD student researching Russian defense policy at King's College London in the War Studies Department. He also, I would add, runs one of the best open-source intelligence trackers of the Ukraine conflict. It is a must-follow.

And we are to be joined by my other colleague, Candace Rondeaux. She's the director of the Future Frontlines program at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State. She was previously a reporter at The Washington Post. She's done some amazing work on Ukraine from before the conflict, some fantastic studies on, for example, the Wagner Group, and she is literally back last night from Kyiv and so brings some great insights into this discussion.

So let's jump right in. I'd like to ask all of you, what is one key lesson that strategists should take away from the Ukraine War, not including Peter Bergen's key lesson of don't invade Ukraine? So, putting that aside, what's another lesson that strategists should take? Sir Lawrence, why don't you go first.

SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: I think the lessons are actually not new lessons. They're pretty old lessons about not invading countries where you won't be welcome, recognizing the pitfalls that all military operations have, so don't expect everything to go to plan, and that it's easier to start a war than to end one. So there's three to be going on with.

SINGER: Why don't we turn next to Dave Kilcullen.

DAVID KILCULLEN: Thanks, Peter, and let me start by apologizing for my voice. It's early morning down here in Australia, and I'm recovering from bronchitis.

I think I have two to suggest. The first one is what we think is rational for an adversary to do isn't necessarily how our adversary is going to see things. If you look at most of the perceived wisdom about what Russia was likely to do immediately prior to the invasion, it mostly turned out to be wrong, and some people were left scratching their heads saying, "Why are the Russians acting so irrationally?" And I think that's a sign that we got it wrong

And the second one to point to is that sanctions do not have the deterrent effect that everybody, including our own President and Secretary of State seem to think they did until about 5 minutes before the invasion. There's been a lot of retconning since, saying “we never expected the sanctions to deter”. That's not actually true, and I think we need to rethink from a strategy standpoint what we think the impact of sanctions are going to be on an adversary that's actually determined to engage in a conflict.

SINGER: Rob Lee?

ROB LEE: Yeah. So, to kind of piggyback on what both Lawrence and Dave just said, wars are unpredictable, and it's hard to predict how they'll go because there are so many factors that are important and can't explain why things go the way they do.

One of the things, you know, I thought a war was going to happen in this case, but my view is that it would likely be something more like compellence, that Russia would kind of attempt to achieve, kind of more, you know—more minimal goals because if you look at what Russia did previously under Putin in previous wars, 2008, 2014, that was more kind of a compellence. It fit better within the Russian military strengths and weaknesses, and made more sense in a lot of regards. And, also, it made more sense in terms of the likely manner of Ukraine resistance.

And what was—you know, what had surprised me so much, that basically Russia applied the 1968 Czechoslovakia invasion plan to Ukraine. Conditions completely didn't make sense, and it very much shows, I think, in my view that President Putin, when he made this plan, that it was developed by him and the FSB, both such a compartmentalized decision-making process, that it didn't bring in people who would say there are some issues with this and/or, you know, members of the Russian military, senior officers, were not in a position to push back and say, you know, "You're telling us to fight a war that in a way that completely goes against our doctrine and everything kind of we do in training exercises."

And so, from the outside, just as someone who follows the Russian military, this is a hundred percent not what I thought Russia would do because this is not now the Russian military fights or trains, and it worked against their strengths. So all these things are very surprising and, you know, not what I predicted, and I honestly—not just that I missed this, but it feels as though the Ukrainian intelligence didn't expect Russia to do this either. And I think most elites in Moscow, people outside of the Kremlin, did not think Russia was going to apply this kind of playbook to it. So it's surprising people everywhere, not just kind of one group in particular, and, you know, I think it was quite hard to predict that they would do this.—

SINGER: —and so his doctrine thinks ahead. So, Candace what are key insights that you would take?

RONDEAUX: So I guess if I had one lesson, there's only one, the one is that the connection between the territorial integrity of a state and political sovereignty is—and democracy is not an abstraction. I think we've been hearing a lot from the Biden administration over the last year or so just generally about this kind of global tussle between autocracies and democracies, and here we have a very concrete example of, you know, the challenge of having a democracy actually work when a country is invaded by its neighbor. This is not an abstraction.

I think the other abstraction that has become a bit of—a distraction is this question of strategic autonomy for Europe. I think now what we've learned is that that is a distant dream that, in fact, there's a great deal of importance still for the U.S. to play in terms of pushing NATO and all of the partners—[audio break.]

SINGER: I think, unfortunately, we may have lost the feed from Candace. If she comes back online, we'll complete hearing from her.

But let's move on. So Rob was very forthright about something that he thought would happen and didn't happen, and that's part of the discussion that's playing out right now, not only among strategist community but also policymakers everywhere from Ukraine to Washington, D.C., London, to most definitely in Moscow.

So let's go back around the horn and do a little bit soul searching ourselves. What is one thing that you got wrong on the conflict, and why? So, Sir Lawrence, why don't you go first. I'll put you on the hot seat.

FREEDMAN: So it goes back to what David said. I thought it was an irrational thing to do. It was an irrational thing to do. I never said it was impossible, but I was pretty skeptical because it was irrational, and I forgot that they do just irrational things. And they've done an irrational thing.

On the other hand, to be frank—I won't say I have got nothing wrong since, but the reasons why I thought it would be irrational guided me and my analysis, as I think they did with Rob and others, about what then happened. You could see why this was going to fail. I think from as soon as they didn't get Zelensky, as soon as they didn't get to Kyiv, you could see why this was going to fail, and it's went in a quite different way to that originally anticipated.

So I think, like many people, I did make the mistake of assuming because something was pretty obviously irrational Putin would be more careful and that even if he used force, he wouldn't go the whole hog. But he did with the consequences we see.

SINGER: Dave Kilcullen.

KILCULLEN: So, this is an easy one for me because I was actually in the middle of teaching a class with a U.S. Army Special Operations group when the Russians invaded, and I had been in the middle of talking about the Crimea model, incrementalism, what I call "liminal warfare," the way they're going to ride the edge of detectability and not go straight for the jugular. And my colleague was like, "Uh, Dave, they just invaded." And I had to say “Okay, stop—let's talk about tank warfare.”

And it took us a while to figure out, because you've got to really question your priors, right? We had a team on the ground pretty quickly in Hostomel looking at that first morning of the war. And I think in that period, the best question was asked by a British general officer of my acquaintance who said, "Did the Russians watch us adapting to their gray zone methods and decide to go conventional instead as a reaction?"

Over time, I think the answer to that is actually no. What they were trying to do was that same liminal warfare approach as in Crimea, but on a massive scale. They were trying to basically pull off at Hostomel a repeat of what they achieved in the first few days of the seizure of Crimea, but as Rob said earlier, they massively miscalculated the likely Ukrainian reaction.

I think somebody—it might have been Rob earlier—said that the Ukrainians might have miscalculated. I thought that too, but now I'm not sure that's true because of the positioning of the Ukrainian SOF and territorial defence organizations around Kyiv and around the western side of the river, in particular. They seem to have pre-postured for something very similar to what VDV (Russian airborne forces) actually tried to pull off at Hostomel.

So, I would say I got it wrong. I'm busy updating what I thought we knew about how Russia makes decisions, as we all are, but I don't think it suggests that they've gone away from that model. In fact, if anything, the experience of the last 6 months has probably reconvinced everybody, "Oh, yeah, that's right: that's why we do it that way, we don't try to pull off a sort of Czechoslovakia-on-steroids against armed opposition," as we saw here.

SINGER: Rob Lee.

LEE: Yes. So I guess I got a lot of things wrong, but in addition to the kind of things I mentioned before, I thought if Russia was going to invade, the plan would be developed primarily by the Russian military, that basically they get a tasking from the political leadership. They develop a plan, and that plan would be in keeping with Russian military doctrine, with how they train, with how they fight, all those kind of things.

That didn't happen, right? It was pretty closely developed by Putin, some very senior intelligence officers, people who did not have a military background, do not understand that if you do a large-scale war, especially with conventional units, you have to give them warning. If you don't give them warning, they're going to do a very poor job.

And I didn't think we'd see Russian soldiers, and most Russian soldiers who were going to war found out the day of they're going to war, and that has so many effects. And, you know, same things, logistics officers, all these other kind of elements, they had no preparation, and so it's not surprising immediately we saw vehicles breaking down, all these kind of mistakes. I thought that they'd be smart enough to kind of think, "Okay. We need to think through these things. We need to prepare for this," and they didn't. So all that was kind of surprising.

But I guess my overall idea is just because this is not what the Russian military was planned by intelligence officers without military experience, you know, we saw a very different war than what someone who looks a Russian military would have expected, because the way we try and predict what the Russian military would do is by looking at how the Russian military, they trained and fights and so on. And none of that really mattered because the whole plan was developed by someone else, and the Russian military was basically given a plan and told to execute.

And one thing to keep in mind—we won't talk about how Putin is a former KGB officer and a lot of his inner circle are former intelligence officers—very few of them are former military officers. Very few fought in Afghanistan in the '80s, Shoigu-designed military experience. So, basically, if he's talking to close friends, close associates who are not senior leaders in the Russian military, he's not getting that kind of feedback about what a military needs to know or to do to be successful in a war.

SINGER: So, Candace, unfortunately, we had some technical difficulties and lost you in midstream. So I'd like to go back and give you a chance, one, to complete the answer to the question of key lesson to take away from this conflict, but then also, we're doing a little bit of soul searching and asking what is it that we got wrong and why.

RONDEAUX: So I guess I think the thing that I got wrong or underestimated was the centrality of logistics, both civilian and military, for this kind of land war and how much it was going to affect the lived experience of Ukrainians. You know, it takes 3 days to get inside the country from over the border, depending on where you're coming from, at least from the United States, and that has real effects on your ability to move things and people in the right place at the right time.

But I think, to Dave's point, on the positioning of Ukrainian forces and particularly around the Kyiv region, I think he's correct that the Ukrainians actually seemed to have anticipated quite a lot. Somehow, they seemed to manage to hold at bay the pincer movement from Belarus, which is fairly impressive.

But I think maybe if there was a miscalculation or sort of something that I also didn't really expect or maybe got wrong, it was also the centrality of Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is, of course, the oligarch who is now, I guess, very much associated with the Wagner Group, in the overall mobilization process. I had not expected to see this just mushrooming of recruitment efforts on the part of the Wagner Group and its various financiers and facilitators at the scale that we've seen. It's been pretty remarkable how much the Russian forces have had to rely on these auxiliaries and how important they have been to that first month or two of the offensive and how key they now are to the future of the mobilization efforts for Russia going forward.

SINGER: Great points. So let's move on to the next question, and it's as follows. And it's a topic that's very near to my heart. What technology do you think has been the most impactful in this conflict? And the answer “tractor” is taken off the stage from you. So, Candace, why don't you go first on that.

RONDEAUX: Yeah. I think there's not any question, and we can sort of say broadly that information technology has been critical for both sides but especially for the Ukrainians. Starlink satellite broadband was a lifesaver, continues to be a lifesaver for the information environment for the Ukrainians in general. Really, you can't overstate the importance of that sort of civilian capacity to continue to communicate with each other at a time when the entire country is under assault, at a time when everything seems to be going wrong, when so many people are displaced. It's really key.

And I think that along with that, encrypted apps, weirdly, have been key—Threema, Signal. These are really key for families and members of the military, for U.S. and NATO supporters to communicate freely, relatively freely, and openly with each other on what's needed in the field, and I think that has been really very important.

And, lastly, I'll just say it is very obvious that drones are driving the day as far as the ability of Ukraine to sort of use persistent surveillance at small scale, medium scale, large scale versus the Russians who now find themselves with their begging bowl out in Tehran looking for the things that they don't have, the kind of kit that they don't have, a need in order to provide the kind of surveillance that they need for targeting at this level.

SINGER: Rob Lee, every day your feed is filled with images of a wide variety of technology. What's your answer for which has been the most impactful in this conflict?

LEE: So Candace made a lot of good points. I think Starlink is a really interesting one that I didn't expect before the war, and one of the important points about that is for Mariupol, and it's, you know, potentially why Mariupol held out as long as it did is the defenders there could connect to family, could connect to the outside world. They saw how important holding out Mariupol was for the broader war. That, I think, was very important, and I think that was Starlink that really played a key role, and I think that was unique.

I think UAVs obviously are playing a big role. Commercial UAVs are playing a big role, but one of the things we're seeing is we're seeing adaptations. So they were very, very important in May, June, and July, most facilitated artillery, but now both sides are using electronic warfare more effectively. So we've seen a lot, you know. It's much more difficult to use commercial UAVs that go beyond the kind of front lines. You really need military UAVs to do that. So we're seeing limitations there, right? And like anything, any new tech, if anything develops, we'll see a countermeasure, and there's always that kind of fight of what improves faster and so on.

The big point I make is that a lot of the most important weapon systems are not new things. Arguably, the most important development in this war is that Ukraine's air defenses held out, and they continue to prevent Russia, Russian air force, from interdicting things beyond the Ukrainian front lines. So Russia can't hit HIMARs. They can't really target Ukraine command and control very effectively. They can't stop them from resupplying. All these kind of things are really critical in the war. In Karabakh 2020, Russia has failed to do that. And the most important reason is probably things like the BUK-M1 or S-300 PTPS systems. These are Soviet systems. They're not new. They're not fancy. They're not sexy, but they play such an important role. They have allowed, you know, more modern systems, like HIMARs, play a very important role.

And so I guess my overview is that—and we talk about combined arms. If there's any weak link, the whole system can fail, and so you need everything in the war. Even if one thing isn't the most advanced, you have to have all that sort of level or else the whole system won't function properly, and that means all these kind of things are important.

SINGER: Dave Kilcullen.

KILCULLEN: So, I agree with pretty much everything that's just been said, so I won't go over it again. Just a couple of additional points.

To reinforce what Rob said, what technology matters depends on what phase of the conflict you're talking about. Handheld infantry anti-armor weapons were quite important in the first month to 3 months of the conflict, much less so now.

Artillery is the oldest and most important weapon system that hasn't been front of mind for a lot of Western operators, because we've spent 20 years doing low-intensity conflict. This is an artillery war. Arguably, one of the most important technologies has been HIMARs in the recent Ukraine breakthrough.

But I go back to the very first thing Candace said. Starlink satellite communications: distributed, low-power, low-signature, remote support communications technologies, allowing people to operate in a stealthy modular way without drawing a massive artillery sledgehammer in response, have been super important.

What will be the most important technologies going forward? Liquid natural gas technologies, pipelines, and gas stoves, and let's hope not wood stoves in Europe will be the most important technologies going forward. That's the critical point of pressure strategically, and it's not a military technology, but it goes back to Candace's point that logistics are critical. And in a long war, industrial capacity, economic capacity, the ability of a civilian population—in this case, outside the war zone—to accept very significant limitations to energy over the cold of winter, that is, I think, going to be a critical factor going forward.

SINGER: Sir Lawrence?

FREEDMAN: Just given the answers that we've got indicate there's an awful lot of things that have been important, especially on the Ukrainian side, some of them like Starlink, quite surprising. And they come together. So if you extract one, then the overall effect might be reduced even more.

We haven't talked much about the Russian side. What has been striking is that though they're supposed to understand combined arms, but they didn't do it. From day one, it was clear they weren't doing it very well, which meant that they were dependent on artillery. Dave is absolutely right. This is an artillery war, as most wars are of this sort. The Russians have been totally dependent upon artillery, largely dependent upon artillery for their offenses in a very particular way. So they made their gains by grinding forward, blasting whatever is in front of them until they couldn't defend any longer. This led to a very attritional confrontation.

One of the limitations for the Russians in the war is they didn't have a lot of the things that we now see the Ukrainians getting, plus the fact that the Ukrainians are able to move away from relying on Warsaw Pact artillery to modern Western artillery, moving from a 20th century army to a 21st century army. It's the precision that makes the difference, and that is something that the Russians don't have anymore.

The information stuff and so on is incredibly important. It is all relevant, but in the end, it's about applied firepower. And the Russians have been dependent on just one particular sort of applied firepower. We just assumed that air power would be playing a much larger role. I remember conversations with Robert on Twitter before the war about the likely impact of Russian air power. Yet the Russians have been very cautious in its use, have lost a number of aircraft when they tried, while Ukraine still has its own functioning air force.

And so I think however much we talk about the new technologies, as important as they are, war in the end is about killing people and breaking things, and that's firepower. And the Russians have got a lot of one type but not much of the more modern accurate types.

SINGER: So now for the question that everyone wants to know which is, what happens next? So let's look into our crystal balls and project what happens next in the days, weeks, months ahead. Sir Lawrence, we're going to go in the reverse order this time, putting you on the spot

FREEDMAN: The Russians are losing.

Now, how they lose and over what time they lose depends on a number of things. It depends on their ability to form new defensive lines and hold them. It seems to me —and Rob and Candace will probably know more about it than I do--t if the Ukrainians can move into the Donbas, that undermines the whole rationale for the war in the first place. And that's to the pressures building up in Russia, which are becoming more evident on a daily basis.

So I think we're in the end game now. The question from before the war was trying to work out what goes on in Putin's mind, and we're still trying to work out what goes on in Putin's mind, including his ability to accept that he's lost, whether he will try to do something big. some sort of dramatic gesture or coerce Ukraine and the West into making concessions.

But I think it's too late for that myself. I think these are things that you could have done earlier in the war. It's too late for effective mobilization. I never believed the tactical nuclear weapon scenario. Some people take it very seriously, indeed.

So the question is, in the sense, going through the stages of grief, going through denial and anger, and the next step is bargaining. Eventually, you get to acceptance, but my view is that's where we're at with all the normal caveats in that war is an uncertain and unpredictable business, and things can go wrong. And you get surprised. So we have to always say that, and Putin requires that we expect this thing to go on for sometime, but it doesn't mean to say that we can't imagine how things might move much more quickly.

SINGER: Dave Kilcullen.

KILCULLEN: I'm a lot less positive about that. I think that we don't know what happens next on the battlefield. We just spent however many minutes talking about all the things we got wrong. I think that, in some ways, this feels like a critical decision point for the Russians to step forward and fully mobilize, and I agree with Larry and Rob that there are limits to what the Russians can do at this point. But, you know, the Korean War looked like it was going extraordinarily well for the United Nations in about October of 1950, and it didn't result in a linear collapse of—

FREEDMAN: Well, 300,000 Chinese around the corner.

KILCULLEN: But we're talking about a Ukraine that is fully mobilized and a Russia that is still running a peacetime military exercise with 50,000 troops on the other side of the country. So, I'm just saying I think we should not be too hasty to write the Russians off, but I do know one thing with absolute certainty that's about to happen: the weather is about to get bad. We've got days before the weather situation significantly deteriorates across the entire theater. So, what I expect to see is not rapid movement on the battlefield but rather a front that settles down or bogs down into the winter.

SINGER: Rob Lee.

LEE: So I did an interview the week prior to the Kharkiv offensive, and I was asked about this and Kherson and elsewhere, and basically, my view was one was kind of what Dave was saying. Basically, I don't know, but I didn't have a great understanding about the force ratios of what units Ukraine mobilized, how ready they were, could they do an offensive. I thought they had good prospects for over the medium term, and that's kind of what I emphasized was that manpower-wise, Russia is going to be in a lot of trouble the longer this war goes on.

I wrote an article in June with Mike Kofman about this. When the Russian military invaded, they invaded with 80, 85 percent of the permanent readiness ground units. Those units were significantly under strength, partially because they lowered the TEO in the years prior, but then they're only two-thirds, three-quarters full. And it's because they lacked enough privates. They had enough officers, but they didn't have enough contract privates. And so that force, the actual Russian military that did most of the fighting the first month, took very heavy casualties, and so then the force composition changed. It then became more aligned on mobilized LDNR kind of separatist people in the Russian-occupied areas, with a lot of heavy fighting. They took very heavy casualties in Donbas. Wagner started playing a bigger role. They started taking heavy casualties, and you sort of lost all these kind of volunteer units. A lot of these volunteer units were guys who had fought in Donbas before and took back arms, so they had some training. When we get to the summer—and that was enough in the late spring, early summer, a kind of manpower advantage in the Donbas to take that territory but at a high cost.

And then when you look at where they are at now, they deployed this third army corps, which is basically a bunch of regional battalions that are semi-raised by the regional governments. They were deployed. They did about a month of training i Nizhny Novgorod. They received really good gear, but they don't have good officers. All the officers are deployed. They don't get NCOs. They're recruiting guys from basically 20 to 50 years old. They don't have military experience. Three weeks is not enough time to become an expert on weapons, let alone to train as a kind of unit. So that unit is not very good.

The war in Kherson now is being fought by volunteers in the service, and initially, I wasn't sure which side had the upper hands. Now it's pretty clear that Ukraine does, not just in terms of quantity but in terms of quality, morale, and so on. And so a lot of these Russian units, they're signing 3-month or 6-month contracts. Well, when those contracts end, how many of these guys are going to keep fighting, given what we've seen of Russian leadership in Ukraine? I think a lot of them are not going to keep serving. I think their army corps is deployed. When 6 months end on those contracts, that's in the middle of winter. How many guys are going to want to sit in a trench somewhere in Ukraine in the winter when the goal is basically— who knows? Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, the areas they control, Russia controls, there's no real significant cultural kind of significance to most Russians in those areas. Strategic isn't very clear either.

And so my kind of world view is that the medium term, Ukraine has a very clear goal, right? And they have a very clear kind of way of achieving it, and they're very unified about that goal. On the Russian side, the goals are not clear. How Russia, you know, can enforce conflict determination is not clear, and the means are getting worse because the manpower issue is going to become worse and worse. They've already recruited the guys who are most desperate for money or the most ideologically support of the war. They're going to start running low on that at some point.

And so I think thought the medium term really favored Ukraine, wasn't sure when that would turn out, but the fact that we just saw a very successful, well-executed offensive operation by Ukraine shows they're capable of doing this. They're doing two offensives at two different regions that also kind of demonstrates manpower advantage they have, and ultimately, the Russians—it's pretty well known that it was clear the buildup was happening in Kharkov and that the Russian command and control did not really take any precautions to prepare for that. Again, it's just a consistent theme. Russian leaders, they've seen battle, the chain of the battlefield, things that are obviously a problem, and they just don't respond until they get kind of smacked in the mouth. And it happened in Snake Island. Once Ukraine got high marks, once it got seasoned artillery, Snake Island was no longer defensible, and yet Russia kept its forces there until they got pounded. And it was just a complete waste of life and equipment.

So, anyway, long story short, I think Ukraine has a lot of advantages here. I didn't think they were going to have this much success in the short term. The fact that they are, I think, indicates the war is going to be even more favorable for Ukraine. I think it's very likely they're going to continue to have success because Russia has pulled reserves from other parts up front to plug in Kharkiv, and that means other areas of Donbas might be open. Again, I think right now if you look at the morale effect of this, the Russian side, Russian soldiers, the morale is going to be hurt by this type offensive and especially the trust in the Russian leadership. Whereas, the Ukrainian side always seems very, very competent and effective, the Ukrainian military leadership, very good strategy and success. They've seen, "We can do this. We just need more equipment," and they can achieve it.

So I'm very bullish on Ukraine at this point.

SINGER: That's great, Rob. I wanted to be sure to get some time for others. So, Candace, I want to take advantage of the fact of your recent travels and actually ask you to respond to two questions. The first is, what are people saying that you were meeting with on Kyiv on what they believe will happen next? And then there is the question that everybody else had which is, what do you, Candace, believe will happen next?

RONDEAUX: I think I'm actually much more concerned about the political situation because, while it's a military war, at the end of the day, there will be political outcomes from whatever happens over the next several months.

From the Russia side of the picture, I think we need to take seriously the fractionalization, the political fractionalization we're beginning to see in terms of officials in St. Petersburg and Moscow calling for Putin's resignation, whether you believe that's serious or not. I think it's pretty serious. It's a big risk for anybody to openly call on Putin to do anything at a time when there are so many restrictions and the rest, detentions going on. I think that's a very bold gamble.

I think the rumblings that we're seeing online from the far right are representative of something new that I would not have expected to bubble up as quickly as it has, and it's a real sign that politically speaking, Putin does not have what he needs long term to prosecute this war for years in the running.

And I also think, interestingly—I was a bit surprised to find that there is this kind of safe haven situation that is beginning to kind of bubble up in Ukraine. That is to say, there are Belarussians, there are Georgians, there are Russian defectors who have gone into Ukraine and found a completely different life, a completely sort of almost bizarro world university in which there is the ability to move around in the world freely, to speak freely, and to live freely in many ways, despite the fact that there's a war going on in Ukraine. And that is a force of mobilization that I think Putin would not have anticipated, and it will be troublesome going forward.

The Ukrainians have apparently given some space to this National Republican Army, whether anybody else takes is seriously or not. I certainly do. I think that they're real, and I think the existence of that force, both on Ukrainian territory and inside Russia, is going to be really problematic for Putin long term.

But, on the flip side, I'll say that Ukraine and Zelensky's government in particular is looking at some serious challenges from potential members of the opposition. The country is now still under martial law. That means parliamentarians, the media, they all have to kind of toe the line, but of course, there's a lot of recognition that a lot of losses that happened, losses of human life. Political dispensation and stability all came down to how Zelensky responded to the threat from Russia before the invasion started, and I think there was a lot of talk on the ground about needing to assess what went wrong there and how much it costs and what it will mean for reconstruction. That's a battle that I don't expect to unfold fast, but I do think, as we get closer to the presidential election period—and the elections are next scheduled for 2024, March of 2024—the closer we wind toward that and, of course, toward our own elections here in the United States, we're going to see a change of dispensation in terms of support for the war overall, both inside Ukraine and outside Ukraine, that we have to be concerned about going forward. But I don' think it's a door that Putin will be able to push on lightly and then it will just sort of swing open for him. The military losses are too much.

And I agree with Sir Lawrence and really Russia is way too far behind now to catch up on anything, with their mobilization or otherwise, and the only option here is to look at divergent movements perhaps in Kaliningrad, using that as a lever against the Baltic states to kind of open up some space or to make it difficult to move logistically things from Poland into Ukraine.

So, I mean, if there is anything that we can expect from Putin, it will be a sense of desperation, I think, come January of this new year.

SINGER: Thank you. So we've got just about 5 minutes left, and I want to move to questions from the audience, but to let our other panelists know that we're limited on time. So what I'd like to do is actually bundle a couple of questions and ask each of you. You can choose to answer both or one of them, but do be aware that there is a limited amount of time.

So two, I thought, particularly interesting questions. One is to build upon what Candace just said, and it's from Ryan Butler, and he talks about the question of—what else gets added to the table as Russia potentially becomes more desperate? The way I think about it is that authoritarian leaders often think escalate to deescalate, you know, expand to try and resolve. So Candace put one thing on the table. What else should we be aware of there?

And then the other question is from Irene Tamaru, and it's both a sort of "What if?" but also a "What next?" We talked about how poorly Russia planned it—I'm going to paraphrase what she has—how poorly Russia planned. What if they had planned well? Or a different way of asking it that she's getting at is, what are lessons that other adversary states are taking from this that they might apply against the United States and its allies?

So let's go back round the horn on those two questions. Sir Lawrence?

FREEDMAN: I'm not sure I want to encourage people to think about how they could have done it better next time, but I think there is a basic problem if you're occupying another person's country. I mean, we've learned this in a painful way, and now Russia has learned this in a rather painful way. So I hope that's the lesson that they keep on learning.

What was the first question again about?

SINGER: What might Russia do to end the conflict?

FREEDMAN: Yeah. I just want to make one point. We obviously think a lot about the Russian means of escalation. We've also got to think what are going to be the issues if they do decide to negotiate, because if I was them, I would ask for a ceasefire. I would have asked for a ceasefire months ago. But I'd ask for a ceasefire now, to which the Ukrainian answer now could be "Sure, as you withdraw." But there's going to be the issue of Crimea. There's going to be the issue of reparations. There's going to be the issue of sanctions. There are issues of war crimes. I'm not quite sure, given the extent to which Ukrainian-Russian relations now are so bitter and poor, how they're going to be handled.

One of the things I would hope the United States might think about this is the role that they might find themselves playing in managing what could be a very tricky transition. So, sure, think about the escalating things. They're very limited in ways that would do the Russians much good. But we also need to think about the possibilities at a time when the Ukrainians do have the upper hand of bringing this war to a more dignified conclusion for the Russians than them just being chased out of the country.

SINGER: Dave Kilcullen.

KILCULLEN: I agree. I think that the Russians have limited vertical escalation options. They do have some pretty significant horizontal escalation options, as Candace mentioned, of spreading it to different geographies, and different forms of conflict. But I think the big play that you might look for—and we may see this as soon as next week when Xi Jinping meets with Vladimir Putin in Uzbekistan—is an attempt to change the dynamic through China's reaction to what's going on here.

I think the other thing I'd be looking for is doubling down on the energy weapon that the Russians have actually found quite effective so far, and that, I think, is a really weak point for particularly European nations going through winter.

SINGER: And very rapidly, Dave, what's one lesson that Beijing has taken from this conflict that it might apply against, say, the United States and its allies?

KILCULLEN: Well, there's been a very, very active debate within the PLA about the lessons of Ukraine, and one of the factions in that debate is suggesting that this is a reinforcement of the notion that you want to be “gray zone”. You want to be asymmetric. You do not want to commit to a conventional-style invasion, and I think that debate is going to play out soon. But that's a key part of it.

SINGER: Great. Rob Lee.

LEE: So not sure how to respond, I think it important. The situation is likely only going to get worse for Russia. So they need to do something. With mobilization comes a lot of risks. There's no guarantee it will improve the situation. I'm not exactly sure how Russia will respond because part of this comes back to what information is Putin getting. What does he kind of see of the war? I think he's bought into this propaganda feedback loop that he designs. He now ingests some of this information, which is not accurate, which is on Russian news. So it's hard see what he learns and what he thinks the best option would be because, again, he so misjudged the Ukraine resistance but also NATO, the European countries, the U.S. All of these countries, he completely kind of misjudged, and the strategic situation has gotten much worse. Sweden, Finland are joining NATO, all these other kind of developments. So I honestly don't know, but the options are somewhat limited, aside from what was already mentioned by Dave.

And then in terms of what will adversaries take away, it's important to emphasize this isn't the war—the U.S. is not fighting this war, and so we're only seeing certain capabilities the U.S. has. The U.S. has a lot more capabilities. So, sure, it shows a little how the HIMARs are effective. Arguably, the most significant is that U.S. intelligence has proven to be extremely successful in this war, both in terms of penetrating Russia's decision-making process, knowing about all these things Russia is planning months and months ahead of time, before, you know, people like Sergey Lavrov knew, right? You see they knew these details well ahead of time, even though it is a compartmentalized operation.

SINGER: Rob, I'm going to intervene there because we're running out of time. So, Candace, you get the last word on both expansion and lessons learned in other adversary capitals.

RONDEAUX: Boy, lessons for adversaries. I think we've already been over those.

I agree with Sir Lawrence that if the U.S. is not tasked, some sort of task force within the NSC to start thinking about the negotiated end game, they need to do it now. The challenge ahead is unwinding this war, and I don't think Zelensky at any time will be in a position to be calling for a ceasefire or walking to the table with an invitation to discuss a ceasefire. That's political suicide for him, and it would, I think, essentially unravel the morale of the Ukrainian forces the minute that that was sort of thrown out there.

But key will be reparations, reconstruction, war crimes, how to deal with those, and to really think about what it will mean potentially if, in fact, there is a tribunal for Putin, as some have called for. That is a huge—it's not a U.S. challenge. It's not a NATO challenge. It's not a Ukraine challenge. The challenge ahead is justice for Ukrainians and stability for Russians, and that will be kind of the song we're singing for the next 5, possibly 7 years is how does this end in a way that those who are responsible for what happened in this first year or 2-year-long war are actually brought to account for what they've done and how do we put Ukraine back together. And by the time we're having that conversation, it is very, very likely that we're going to see the crumbling of the Russian Federation. I really genuinely believe that this is one of the most destabilizing events in Russian history, possibly since World War II, maybe even since the Bolshevik Revolution.

And later we're going to be looking back at this time and thinking, wow, we just weren't ready for like the third collapse of the Russian empire, and we didn't have a plan for it. And I think if we do anything in the next 6 months or so from the U.S. side and from the NATO side, it's thinking about what is the plan for the inevitable collapse of Putin regime but also the plan for putting that region back together over time and bringing justice to those who are accountable for these war crimes.

SINGER: That on is a perfect ending to a fantastic conversation.