ReConsider

A #Politics #podcast without partisan perspectives. We challenge you to reconsider your views by providing context. But we don't do the thinking for you.

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Some Russians are hoping that Putin is gone by 2023 and then the new guy can come in and save face for the Russians.

He can say, "this was a bad idea. Let's make a deal.

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UK intelligence is publishing that there are people in the Russian government that seems to think they're not going to off Putin, but that he'll likely be gone by 2023 - which is only seven months away.

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The Ukrainians have changed their tune recently.

They're not ready for a cease fire.

They want to kick the Russians out.

They want to get the Donbas back.

They might even be able to get Crimea back.

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Ukrainians unlike the Russians are full of morale, manpower and money

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The other unfortunate part is that wars of attrition take longer than everyone expects.

In WWI everyone thought people would be home by Christmas.

But it's amazing how long people are willing to stick out something that's not working just because withdrawing is hard

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I think the key thing to understand here at this point is that the Ukrainians now believe that they can win.

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Russia may be running out of drones, which is really interesting because it's a big part of their intelligence gathering and the Ukrainians are trying really hard to shoot them down.

But nobody's selling drones to Russia right now because NATO.

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😲 The UK currently believes that the Russians have lost about a third of their combat capacity.

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The defense of Mariupol was truly insane and is going to go down as one of the greatest stories of heroism and courage in military history.

The Ukrainians have a lot to be proud of there.

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It looks that the Russians will run out of people, morale, money, and time before the Ukrainians.

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As long as this continues to be mostly a war of attrition, the Ukrainians will eventually win.

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As far as we can tell, Ukrainian casualties have been high - in both manpower and equipment, - in this phase of the war, unlike the beginning

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Another big change is that Russia is spearheading their assaults with their most elite troops.

They weren't able to do that before.

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Unfortunately Russia has tons of old artillery, and it turns out it's fairly reliable. It's not accurate, but you can bring down a lot of shells

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Important note: The Russians have a huge advantage in a material.

They don't have a huge advantage in manpower, but they have a huge advantage in material

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Unfortunately the Russians are willing to suffer massive casualties and spend a lot of material looking for a big blow. They're desperate to have any kind of victory or good news.

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The Russians are trying to make this a maneuver warfare operation by utilizing their artillery and air support so they can do combined arms operations.

They haven't shown to great at those, but they can do them in limited pushes.

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This map is actually quite frightening when you look at it because you see just how many BCGs battalion tactical groups the Russians have in the area.

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Update: Ukrainians did successfully push the Russians largely back from Kharkiv.

The Russians wanted to keep pressure on Kharkiv to prevent the Ukrainians from being able to outflank the Russian's push southward to encircle the troops around Donbas.

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Big thanks @JominiW for the intel we brought up on our most recent episode!

https://t.co/cxEXX2GB5g