Planning for a Post-American Future in Ukraine

HUGH EAKIN

Jack, it’s great to have you here on the podcast to talk about Ukraine at this crucial moment in the war. In recent weeks, we’ve obviously had almost constant talk of the Trump administration’s effort to bring both sides to the table. I want to get to the implications of those ever shifting discussions, but maybe we could start with your current assessment of the actual fighting—the situation on the front lines.

JACK WATLING

Sure. So I think if we’re going to look at the military situation, we should break it into the tactical, the operational, and the strategic. At the tactical level, the Ukrainians have worked out a pretty effective combination of tools to inflict very heavy losses on Russian forces and continuous attrition of equipment, enablers—the things that allow the Russian army to keep fighting. And because they are doing that across around 15 to 20 kilometers of depth, the Russians are really struggling to make progress. Every few hundred meters is costing them a lot of people and a lot of material.

At the operational level however, the Russians are still making progress against their objectives. And that’s largely because, while they are not very good at taking ground—the quality of their forces has declined significantly—they are replacing their losses both in terms of people and personnel; at a sustainable rate in terms of people, and at a rate which gives them a reasonable runway in terms of equipment. The Ukrainians at the moment are struggling to replace their losses, in terms of wounded, and therefore they are becoming more stretched. And equipment-wise, the Ukrainians are critically dependent on their international partners, and some of their international partners, including the United States, have been less forthcoming with some of the materiel that they need. And so the position is getting harder for the Ukrainians at the operational level.

At the strategic level, we see a situation in which leverage is building for the Russians militarily at the moment, and therefore the Russians are quite prepared to keep this fight going. They see their leverage building over time. But there will be an inflection point where, if the current rate of losses are sustained, the Russians will have to make some very difficult political choices if they want to keep the loss rates that they currently have, and that will essentially lead them to need to forcefully mobilize a proportion of their population. And after that point, they will also start running into equipment shortages. And so if Ukraine can fight to a standstill, essentially, up to that tipping point, strategic leverage is likely to tip the other way.

HUGH EAKIN

This is a really great overview. I think for some listeners this may, particularly the tactical level, may be really interesting. We don’t hear so much about this. And as we’ve followed the reversal in Kursk—Russia has retaken, I take it, most of that territory that Ukrainian forces seized last summer—and of course the intense pressure in Donetsk, including the town of Pokrovsk and other towns nearby that have been these strategic battles going on for months. . . And we may have a sense of Russia just grinding away and gradually gaining territory. But from what you’re saying, Russia is not winning this war as we speak now.

JACK WATLING

So in the context of Kursk, the Russians essentially established fire’s dominance over the ground lines of communications—the roads—that allowed the Ukrainians to resupply their forces, which meant that it was costing the Ukrainians a lot of people just to stay on the positions they were defending. And when Russia threw 22 brigades worth of troops at those positions, the Ukrainians executed a pretty well-orchestrated withdrawal. They recovered most of their people; they lost quite a lot of equipment, but there is now a much more stable line of defense on the Ukrainian side of the border.

The situation around Pokrovsk is different. The Russians were advancing, and their advance was accelerating up until around Christmas, but there were a range of capabilities that the Ukrainians were building and scaling and learning how to use which matured over that period. And as a result, the rate of Russian losses increased, and then we essentially saw Russian gains stall. And we now have a situation where the Russians really struggle to advance through about 10 to 15 kilometers towards the Ukrainian positions. And when they get to the Ukrainian positions, there just aren’t that many of them left. And so there aren’t many Ukrainians on that forward line of contact, which means that often the Ukrainians get displaced, but actually they can counterattack, the Russians can’t necessarily consolidate control over the areas that they are pushing the Ukrainians away from, and so we have this 20 to 30 kilometer stretch of territory where there are small counterattacks going back and forth. It’s costly, but fundamentally the Russians are not achieving their objectives. They planned to take Pokrovsk in November of last year, and it still hasn’t fallen. It’s not even encircled.

HUGH EAKIN

That’s really remarkable. One of the other signs of this, I take it, are just the casualty figures. And I believe there are some estimates that Russia has lost 100,000 in 2025 alone so far, which, if I have that right, that seems quite staggering. And I guess the question is, can Russia continue to sustain that level of attrition?

JACK WATLING

So this is the remarkable thing about the Russian society and military. They had a target of recruiting around 420,000 troops as volunteers last year. And depending on how you count it, the number of recruits fell between 407,000 and 430,000 troops. So they came very, very close or just exceeded their target of people signing contracts and joining the military. They have set a lower target this year, which is interesting, but they are on track to achieving their recruitment target still. And so at the moment, yes, they can sustain those losses.

It’s also really important to understand that, the way it’s working at the moment in the Russian military, you have most of the units not engaging in offensive operations. Most of the units are holding ground. But within the unit there is about a 30 percent fringe that is used for assaults. And those are the guys that are pushed into these attacks; they get killed, and the unit then gets rotated out. It receives a new group of assault troops, and a different unit goes in and takes the punishment for a bit. But the result is that we don’t hit a point where the unit’s morale collapses because, for most of the units, they are comparatively safe.

The Ukrainians are trying to increase the risk in greater depth by extending the range of their attacks. But fundamentally, you have this quite persistent, slow, very inefficient, very ineffective approach to a continuous offensive being pushed by the Russians. It goes up and down in intensity as they rotate the units in and out, but so far they can sustain the losses. What you’re seeing, though, is that the amount they’re having to pay people as bonuses to sign up is going up and up and up. And so there is a pool that will dry up eventually, and that’s when if they want to keep going, they will have to resort to more forceful conscription.

HUGH EAKIN

And meanwhile, the character of war on the battlefield is changing dramatically, as I think you’ve described in some of your pieces and as you just mentioned—Ukraine relentlessly introducing new tactics. And the picture of the battlefield today, with Russians on motorbikes and thousands of drones overhead, just seems completely different from 2022. And I wonder how you would assess that dramatic shift in terms of which side has benefited most from this dramatic innovation.

JACK WATLING

So if we were looking in really crude terms, you could say that the war’s gone through three cycles of innovation and adaptation. In the first part of the war, we had units, Russian units, operating in quite concentrated, conventional forces—packages. There was a low density of forces both on the Russian side and the Ukrainian side. And so there was a lot of maneuver back and forth. It was quite dynamic. And most of the weaponry being used was legacy weaponry, shall we say.

We then transitioned to a period where the more capable troops on both sides had been attrited, so they had been wounded and killed or broken up into new units. The size of forces, so the density of forces, on both sides had increased significantly. But the tactics being employed and the tools being employed were still legacy tactics and equipment, and that was the 2023 offensive and then Russian counteroffensive period.

We then move into 2024, and over the course of 2024, we see much lower force density, so forces being dispersed to survive. We see mass introduction of UAVs—so drones of varying types—and a very, very rapid innovation and counter-innovation cycle on both sides where they are copying each other, learning how to use these tools. But at the same time, while the technical specialists and the artillery, the drone operators, the [electronic warfare] operators have become much more proficient on both sides, the attrition in ground forces, in infantry, has seen a qualitative decline in the forces—more substantially on the Russian side, but nonetheless it’s inflicted both sides. And so the ability to conduct rapid offensive action or combined arms operations at scale has shrunk. And this has led to essentially stasis, where neither side is able to break through and build momentum most of the time.

HUGH EAKIN

Getting to that question of UAVs, this seems an interesting paradox because, as you said earlier, overwhelmingly Ukraine continues to rely on that Western military aid, and yet we see statistics that upwards of 70 percent of casualties now are caused by these very low tech drones. And also in this latest phase, Ukraine is producing something like a million a year, and I guess will continue to increase its production. To what extent can this new defense production power, even very low tech, compensate for the continued decline of those large scale weapons systems from the West?

JACK WATLING

So the first thing I think we have to understand is that there has been a permanent impact from Russian Iskander and other tactical ballistic missiles, on the one hand, and for Russians, the Ukrainian GMLRS—so guided precision rockets—on their logistics infrastructure. These weapon systems allow strikes deep behind the lines and, as a result, the density of materiel that can be built up behind the lines is much lower than it would’ve been historically. But this ability to reach behind each other is using high-end conventional systems that we would recognize. If those capabilities are lost by either side, then the other side will be able to increase the efficiency of their logistics. And it’s not clear that UAVs can automatically step into the gap in that area. And so I think we have to acknowledge firstly that there’s a shaping effect.

Secondly, there is a really powerful relationship between UAVs and artillery. Artillery is a lot more responsive, it’s a lot more reliable. It doesn’t get affected particularly by weather to nearly the same extent. There are periods where you just really struggle to use UAVs. It’s less susceptible to electronic warfare. And so artillery offers a lot of advantages and it’s just extremely destructive. However, artillery pieces themselves are vulnerable to being hunted down by drones, and so you have to be very selective about when you reveal their position.

And so what we see is that the enemy can choose to maneuver really slowly and carefully and in a dispersed way to avoid being hit, broken down by artillery, if they concentrate. But then they get picked off by UAVs. Alternatively, they can try and go really fast, in which case they’re going to probably run into minefields and those sorts of problems, or they can try a concentrated attack, in which case the artillery will break them down.

Now, what you’re actually seeing at the moment in many cases is that people fear the effect of artillery first and foremost, and so they disperse and they try and infiltrate, and therefore the UAVs have time to go and hunt them down. Which means that yes, most of the casualties at the moment are being caused by UAVs, but it’s a function of the relationship between these weapon systems combined with the fact that, on the Ukrainian side, they just don’t have that much artillery. If we look at what is killing and wounding Ukrainian soldiers, Russian artillery is still a very, very major factor.

HUGH EAKIN

And so looking bigger picture, we have just in the imminent future the running out of American aid, the last big aid package, and Europe stepping in various ways, which was the subject of your last piece—let’s talk about Europe for a minute. To what extent are you seeing a resolve to actually step up in some of the ways that you outlined in your piece?

JACK WATLING

So there is a will across Europe to step up and aid Ukraine. Ukraine’s defense is seen as a way of buying time for Europe to get its own conventional deterrence into shape, and therefore there is willingness in Europe to sustain Ukraine in the fight and protract Russia being fixed against that problem because it improves European security.

The problem is that most European leaders decided to go down this path very late, and for a long time they didn’t want to divert investment into defense production because that had a longer lead time to getting equipment into Ukraine than just buying stuff off the international market if they had money—there was a timeline issue. And there was also the fact that a lot of domestic budgets were primarily geared toward things like assisting with the massive increase in the cost of energy as a result of some of Russia’s unconventional activities during the war.

And so when we put those things in combination, while there is the will in Europe, there are very, very weak economies, there is high levels of debt, so borrowing is not attractive, increasing taxes is not attractive. And so then you’re talking about redistributing money within budgets for defense. That becomes challenging because, in the United Kingdom for example, we just managed to achieve a trajectory toward a 0.2 percent increase in defense spending by pretty much eliminating most of our international aid funding.

Now obviously international aid does serve a purpose in foreign policy, and we’ve just eliminated practically a whole budget line to get a really minimal increase in defense spending. If we’re going to go after a budget where there is a significant amount of resource to redistribute, then we are going after things that are electorally sensitive because improving services was something that our government was elected with a mandate to do. So there are some really big challenges in terms of translating the clear security calculus into the investment needed to underpin an uplift of equipment for Ukraine.

Europe does have strengths in some areas. We’ve seen reasonable amounts of investment into shell production; insufficient investment into nitrocellulose enrichment and explosive energetics, so the powder that propels shells; armored vehicle production, there’s a lot of capacity in Europe, but it’s a lot of small workshops, essentially, that produce relatively low numbers of different kinds of vehicle. And so there are some big decisions that need to be made in Europe around consolidation if we are going to make this process efficient.

There are also capabilities that Europeans simply cannot substitute from the United States. One of them is Patriot interceptors, so interceptors capable of intercepting ballistic missiles for air defense. Another is the GMLRS that I spoke about just before. Those are things that the U.S. produces, exports, and Europe does not have analogs that it can just order.

HUGH EAKIN

To which one could maybe add also intelligence and communications—the Starlink system. Given that there are, will be, these constraints on specific U.S. systems, are there workarounds for that, or is there a theory of how this support could go forward?

JACK WATLING

So Starlink’s an interesting one. On the one hand, the Ukrainians are massively exposed to Starlink disruption because they use it extensively. At the same time, unlike things like GMLRS, which the United States produces, Starlink is a service to which many European countries are already paying the subscriptions for Ukrainian use. And so the real question there is not so much whether the United States is willing to spend money and gift equipment. The real question there is, is Starlink as a company willing to honor the contracts that it has already signed? And if it’s not prepared to do that, and that is a policy lever that the United States could pull, then that starts to cut away at confidence across the board, to be honest, in the assurance of any service that is provided by the United States. So that becomes a much more significant strategic decision for the United States.

In terms of alternatives, firstly, the Ukrainians are having to work on the assumption that it is going to be pulled because their exposure to the system is so great that they can’t just leave that as a point of leverage against themselves. And so they are already adapting. They will continue to use Starlink because it’s very efficient. The alternative ways of working, and there are other ways of doing the various things that Starlink does, it’s not one system—it’s not a like-for-like replacement. You end up using different alternative communication bearers for different functions that are currently performed by Starlink terminals. So just in terms of the effect this has already had, this is a huge diversion of a significant amount of time, energy, and resource within the Ukrainian state that is already having to be borne simply to prepare for an unacceptable risk.

HUGH EAKIN

On the other hand, Ukraine. . . I mean, one of the perhaps bright spots that one hears is that Ukraine’s own defense production has dramatically improved since the early phases of the wars. Is that true? And is there potential there with European funding, say, to do much more in Ukraine?

JACK WATLING

There’s a huge amount of industrial capacity in Ukraine. Ukraine was the heartland of the Soviet defense industrial base. And it was responsible for a lot of the higher-end engineering and production processes. Now, Ukraine as a state didn’t have the money at the end of the breakup of the Soviet Union to retain those industries. But what it did have were the scientists in those industries. And so what they had was this pretty significant number of very, very experienced, well-educated defense scientists who got jobs in other industries and so on but now, during the war, have been able to come back. And they have fueled a very, very sophisticated R & D process within the Ukrainian government. There is a startup culture around a lot of this stuff, which has enabled a ramping up of Ukrainian defense production. There are a lot of things that Ukraine cannot produce, and there are also huge dependencies within the Ukrainian defense industries on international supply chains.

People often make the point that it’s much cheaper to produce drones, for example, in Ukraine than it is to buy them for the U.S. military. That is partly a function of labor and the very, very small profit margins that Ukrainian companies charge. But it is also a function of the fact that the Ukrainians get a huge proportion of the components for their UAVs from China. China has a very large civilian UAV commercial sector, and that gives them economies of scale in producing the components, whereas the U.S. military requires that components for its UAVs are manufactured in the United States. Most of those U.S. drone manufacturers do not have a civilian customer base to offer scale, and therefore, given relatively small order volumes for what they produce, those companies charge an awful lot more for them. So there are some things that the Ukrainians can do that we would struggle to replicate.

HUGH EAKIN

And those international supply chains in those cases could continue to function without, say, U.S. support or even presence?

JACK WATLING

Some would be affected if the United States was not willing to sell to Ukraine or sell to European countries who would then reexport to Ukraine. There is also the risk—I mean, the Russians are actively looking at how they can disrupt and break down Ukrainian supply chains for UAVs. And so they’re trying to identify Chinese dependence and where that can be interrupted. But at the moment, China sees significant benefit in essentially suppressing Europe and the United States’ ability to have a large UAV industry by flooding the market in the civilian space. So China would rather export this stuff, even if it means a large proportion of it gets diverted to Ukraine.

HUGH EAKIN

I’m struck by this immensely complex battlefield and supply chain situation that you’re describing—that so much of this has been lost in the recent focus on the Trump administration’s push for simply ending the war. And I guess the central question that all of this raises, perhaps, is, what effect does this very intense push from Washington have on the momentum of the war? And do you see both in the near and medium term that we’re not just confronting a disappearance of U.S. support but active pressure on Kyiv? And what downstream implications going forward does that have, if you can step back?

JACK WATLING

So I think it’s already imposed a lot of inefficiencies by forcing Ukraine and its partners outside of the United States to essentially have to hedge against significant reduction in U.S. engagement and potential, as you say, leverage being applied by the United States against Ukraine. Starlink is a good example of that where effort has to be put into redesigning the command and control system to reduce exposure even though Starlink works pretty well and it may well remain available. So that could all be wasted effort. And in a large scale conflict waste and inefficiency is not a good thing. So it’s cost Ukraine a lot.

There’s also the fact that Russia has been massively emboldened by this process. This was not a conflict that was going well. Leverage could have been applied against Russia in all sorts of ways. One of the most effective actually being something that the Trump administration achieved indirectly through its tariff policy, of significantly reducing the price of oil. If that could be done deliberately and could be sustained, it would have a strategic impact on Russia’s confidence in its ability to sustain the war and therefore its need to get concessions. But what we haven’t observed is that the United States is willing to apply leverage against the Russians.

Instead, the administration has indicated that it wants normalization with Russia, it wants to lift sanctions so that it can have an economic relationship with Russia. And it has even suggested, although the administration’s gone back and forth on this, that it might reduce some of its commitments in Europe in order to try and get a peace, and so actually give Russia strategic gains against NATO, not just against Ukraine. And in that context, the Russians really don’t see any cost to continuing to build leverage by changing facts on the ground, continuing to apply pressure on Ukraine and political stress on Europe, and, in particular, using information operations to exacerbate the relationship between Europe and the United States. Because if they can fracture that, they can start threatening and coercing European states bilaterally, and that gives them a magnified sense of influence in European affairs.

So I think at the moment, the way this has been pursued has given the Russians a lot of opportunity. There is the interesting question, which is that the Russians don’t seem to be delivering for Mr. Trump what he has asked for, which is a resolution to the conflict. And at some point, the administration may become frustrated with the fact that the Russians are clearly stringing him along, and U.S. policy could shift. But at the moment, it’s trending in a way which is very favorable to Russia.

HUGH EAKIN

Thinking about this, I’m struck by something you wrote last October in an earlier piece for Foreign Affairs. And you said at the time, “It would be particularly dangerous… if Ukraine were forced into negotiations as the situation at the front continues to unravel in Russia’s favor.” And you go on to describe historically how this can be so dangerous. And I just wondered whether you see that coming into view now, that all this pressure on negotiations, at a time when the conditions for negotiations haven’t yet really been established on the Ukrainian side. . .

JACK WATLING

Look, let’s say the Russians agree to a ceasefire. That is not the end of the danger for anyone, because it’s worth noting that this war has been going on since 2014. And for Ukrainians, there is no reason to believe that if a ceasefire came into effect, the Russians wouldn’t use that time to reequip their forces, put their people through some training, get ready, and go again. And what would deter that? The Russians may well use the election in Ukraine that would follow a ceasefire, the threat of re-invasion to degrade Ukraine’s economy, and therefore create conditions that are extremely favorable to a third full-scale conflict that is much more favorable to Russia where they don’t make the mistakes that they did the first time around.

The point I’m getting at is that, when Ukrainians are pushing back on negotiating at this point, it’s not because they don’t want peace. They do want peace. It’s because they don’t want peace on any terms that compromises their sovereignty and everything they’ve been fighting for three years. And if they can’t get some framework which offers a lasting peace, then it’s not worth it.

Now, the things that could deliver a lasting peace do require some concessions from the Russians. And the issue is that if you go into negotiations, to answer your question, at a time when the Russians are really not feeling the pressure on the battlefield, in the Kremlin, at least—the Russian army may be, but it hasn’t filtered through to the Kremlin yet—they’re prepared to keep using the military instrument, and they’re not feeling any economic pressures or any other pressures that are threatening the viability of their policy, then there is absolutely no reason for them to make any of the concessions that would give Ukrainians confidence that there is going to be a lasting peace.

HUGH EAKIN

Right, and maybe this takes us back to our starting premise, which is that in fact the most likely outlook for the immediate future is more fighting. I would be curious if you think that is the case, and what is your assessment of what could happen over the next few months in view of the fact that, as you’ve said, there isn’t really a clear sense that either side can change the dynamics in play right now on the front lines?

JACK WATLING

I mean, I think just to circle back to what I said at the beginning about this strategic mountain that we’re climbing; in the short term, the advantage we have is that negotiations have started during stalemate, although not a mutually hurting stalemate, rather than during a period where the Ukrainian position is rapidly deteriorating. And if we look back to what was happening in the autumn, the Ukrainian position was starting to deteriorate and Russian gains were accelerating.

So we’re in a much better position than if negotiations had started then. The question therefore is, at the moment the Russians can keep up the pressure. Reduction in international assistance, particularly from the United States, will make it harder for the Ukrainians and more costly for them to keep fighting. And so will that stalemate be sustained?

The Russians have the opportunity, by continuing to fight, to wear down the Ukrainians in the next six to eight months and then potentially start to make more gains. If the Russians are not able to do that, if the Ukrainians are able to weather the pressure, I think that Russia will pass a tipping point where sustaining the war becomes much more dangerous for Russia domestically, much more costly for them in the long term. And then the Ukrainians may be in a much more propitious position to negotiate. So if I was looking at this from a Ukrainian point of view, I think militarily the medium term is going to be extremely difficult, but longer term, if they can weather that pressure, it will be possible for them to gain leverage.

HUGH EAKIN

Fascinating. Are there any other dynamics that you think we’ve missed or that you would like to stress?

JACK WATLING

I mean, there’s an awful lot of stuff happening at the moment, so it’s difficult to pin down to one. But I’d say, in Washington, when I engage with policy makers in the United States, there is a tendency to talk about China, the Indo-Pacific, Russia as separate problems. And from a purely U.S. war plans point of view, I think that makes sense. But when we look industrially, the Chinese are the backbone of Russia’s ability to wage war from a military industrial point of view. They’re quite happy to see this conflict continue. When we look from a scientific point of view, it is Russian engineers who are improving North Korean munitions, training North Korean troops, working with the Iranians, improving Iranian missiles and drones. And so these are interconnected problem sets.

And I think between the United States and European partners, we need to have a constructive conversation about burden sharing, how we divide that effort in a way which is a managed process so that people have time to make investments wisely and to accept risk with one another. And that’s how we can manage threats manifesting in quite different parts of the world. But it requires us to recognize that these are connected issues. Whereas if we talk about it purely in terms of a zero-sum as to which one you are prioritizing, then the risk is that you end up with deterioration all over because you’re not having a constructive conversation about burden sharing and how you can address an increasingly collaborating group of adversaries.

HUGH EAKIN

Right. And this calls to mind another question for you as a land warfare expert. It seems like we’ll be studying the war in Ukraine for years to come. What are some of the surprises or key revelations for you in terms of war fighting strategy that maybe have emerged in the more recent phases of the war? In each phase, I think there have been dynamics that couldn’t have been foreseen beforehand, but are there some key larger takeaways that you think Western militaries will be intending with in their own strategic planning?

JACK WATLING

I wouldn’t say that there have been massive surprises in terms of things happening that we could never have foreseen. What we’ve had is huge amounts of data and clarity about how different systems interact. The one thing I would say is that there is a lot of misuse of Ukraine as a lesson, in the sense that a lot of people come to very firm conclusions without access to good data. If you don’t have good data on Ukrainian casualties, for example, it’s very easy to draw the wrong conclusions about which tactics were sensible and which ones were not. And so we have to be very careful in the lesson space that we are having a conversation which is grounded in data and evidence. And a lot of the time, there is quite high confidence conclusions being drawn from data sets that have very significant gaps. So I guess it’s just a cautionary tale.

HUGH EAKIN

Great, Jack. Well, thanks so much for joining us, and I hope we will have an opportunity to get you into our pages again soon.

JACK WATLING

It’s always a pleasure working with you.