 Okay everybody, we're ready to get started now. Well good morning and welcome to another edition of the Russian Military Forum. For those of you who have not previously attended such an event, I thought I would start off by introducing the series. The Russian Military Forum is a recently new initiative of the Russia and Eurasia Program here at CSIS. Under its guise, we expect to hold a series of events over the next year on key issues regarding Russia's military and its defense and security policy. Among the topics we anticipate covering will be a deep look at Russia's military strategy, the progress of its military modernization programs and probably a look at some of the individual service branches and how they're progressing. So welcome to all of you and I hope you'll be able to attend some of these events going forward. Of course the focus of today's event is on Russia's hybrid warfare campaign in Ukraine. Before I introduce today's speaker, I thought I would start off by saying a few words about the topic just to provide a little context. First, the advent of Russia's hybrid warfare methodology in Ukraine has clearly emerged as one of the key issues arising out of the conflict. And it has deservedly received widespread attention in the media and in the policy community in general. Russia's actions in Ukraine, especially as hybrid warfare methods, have clearly challenged the West in new and unprecedented ways. And that is because Russia's military involvement in Ukraine has been anything but conventional. In Crimea, Russia launched its stealth campaign, relying primarily on elite troops, often without insignia, the so-called little green men to rapidly seize and gain control of the Crimean Peninsula. In a relatively bloodless affair. By contrast, in eastern Ukraine, Russia has used and at times bewildering a mix of both military and non-military measures to achieve its objectives, albeit with considerable bloodshed. For the most part, Russia has chosen to fight unconventionally, acting indirectly through armed rebels and so-called volunteers, which have been dispatched to the Donbass region. At other times, Russia has chosen to act directly, inserting its own regular forces as and when it deemed necessary to tip the balance of the fighting in its favor. In addition, Russia has employed a number of non-military means to enhance and achieve its objectives in Ukraine. Using economic measures such as cutting off or threatening to cut off oil and gas to both Ukraine and Western Europe itself, denying Ukrainian industry access to Russian markets, deploying spyware and launching cyber attacks on Ukrainian government sites, using diplomatic delaying tactics such as engaging in endless ceasefire negotiations, and perhaps most importantly of all conducting sophisticated information operations both to undermine the support of the Maidan regime and to bolster support for Russia's actions in both Ukraine and in Russia itself. Throughout, Russia has engaged in an active campaign of denial designed to disguise the extent of its involvement in Ukraine. And thus far, these tactics have been quite effective. While the West has been struggling to formulate an effective response, the Ukrainian army is losing the war on the ground. All of this raises a number of important questions, both for Ukraine and the West. How does Russia's hybrid campaign actually work? Just what are the specific methods that Russia has been using in Ukraine? What are the origins of Russian's hybrid warfare approach? How much does it represent deliberately formulated doctrine that have been planned in advance, or how much are the Russians just winging it as they go along? Are these methods transferable to other potential conflicts? For example, could we see these kinds of methods used in the Baltics? Why has the West struggled to mount an effective response to this new hybrid war campaign? And what should the West do to counter these measures going forward? To explore some of these topics further, we are extremely fortunate to have with us today Dr. Philip Karber. Dr. Karber is currently president of the Potomac Foundation, a defense and foreign policy think tank located here in the D.C. area. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Department of Government, where he lectures on military and security affairs. He's a veteran military analyst with a distinguished career, both inside and outside of government. Among the highlights he previously served as a director, I'm sorry, as an advisor on strategy for former Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger. Most importantly for our purposes today, Dr. Karber has conducted 12 separate fact-finding missions to Eastern Ukraine since the crisis erupted, holding discussions with a variety of both military and civilian participants in the campaign. And he is here with us today to share some of those insights that he has gained. So with that background in mind, I am pleased to welcome our guest speaker, Dr. Philip Karber. And Phil, thanks again for joining us today, and I'll turn the floor over to you. Thank you. It's great to be back at CSIS. I was a doctoral fellow here in the late 60s at CSIS, not in this building. At the time, we were above a grocery store on 18th Street. The only thing we in the grocery store had in common were the roaches. And when we founded the Potomac Foundation in 1988, the first event we did was co-sponsored with CSIS under Dave Abshire. It was called Defense Economics for the 90s. I was thinking about it this morning. Where the hell did the peace dividend actually go? Anyway, so it's very great to be here. And Paul raised, I think, the right questions. I don't claim I'm gonna give you answers to half of them, let alone all of them. But I'd like to give you a perspective. Some of them will be personal, and some will be analytical. I got started a year ago this month because Potomac had ran over 1,000 seminars for over a 20-year period in helping a number of the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet republics who were interested in more Western orientation. When the new interim government came in, they sent a letter and said, hey, we had attended some of your seminars before. Would you come over and do an assessment of our situation? I was interested in doing that, but I felt like it was important to do it as a bipartisan effort. At the time, at least whatever independent assessment when we came out didn't end up being just politicized. So I reached out to an old friend and colleague known for 30 years, General Wesley Clark, a former NATO commander, a former 2004 Democratic presidential candidate. And the two of us decided to do it as a bipartisan effort. I called him on Friday, and 72 hours later, we were in Kiev. Over the last year, we sort of had a division of labor, sort of ironic, the general ended up doing most of the politics and the civilian ended up doing most of the military stuff. But when we first got to Kiev, we realized that being in the capital was not the best place to get a good assessment of what was going on militarily. So over the last year, as Paul said, I've made numerous trips to the front. And when I say front, I'm not talking about VIP visits, but actually going out and being with troops in the field. Been behind the lines three times, one unintentionally, made a wrong turn in a rainstorm. Been under fire a couple of times. So when I talk about Russian artillery, I can say it was some degree of personal experience. One of the things that makes it easy is the Minister of Defense and the Minister of Interior gave us basically a remit, sort of a free pass to basically go anywhere, ask any questions, and it's been very helpful in terms of being able to do a very honest assessment. I ask the separatist side if they would give us a similar one, but they so far haven't come through with it. Gonna start off with Garisa Moss, some excerpts, Chief Staff of the Russian General Staff. He gave this speech in a closed session at the General Staff Academy, and then excerpts of it were later published. But it's really probably the most succinct statement by any senior Russian military official of their kind of view of the future direction of war. They don't claim it's their invention. In fact, most of the examples he uses when he wrote this piece were actually from other parts of the world, but they were generalizing or making some general statements. And what they argue is essentially the old constructs, essentially that we've grown up with in the grossing world of states where people declare war, where you have formal military uniforms and responsibility, you have normal traditional military hierarchical organizations. His argument is that a lot of that has essentially gone away. Again, this isn't necessarily by Russian design, but by their summing up or concluding what they think are current trends. They also spend some time talking about new types of forces, mobile, smaller units that work on a dispersed battlefield. If you look at Russian exercises over the last 10, 15 years, particularly the Zafad series, which they did in 1999, 2009, and again in the fall of 2013, and look at their critiques of those exercises, you can see them really struggling with their force design and their issues. I think some of these are pretty interesting, not only in terms of the forces that's involved, but the idea that you're having operations throughout the depth of an opponent's area, simultaneously with the initial combat, that some of the major aspects of the conflict are not military, that the issue is already decided politically, and the military forces are merely consummating other forms of action. And the last paragraph's kind of interesting, where he talks about the use of robotic systems, and I'll personally experience the Russian use of them, and I must say it is startling when you experience it. My argument is that basically, there's sort of four stages, four elements of hybrid warfare. To me, what makes hybrid unique is not that it's unconventional, we could just call it unconventional war. It is that you actually have a political, adjuv-prop information war that can transcend or go into a major insurgency that can turn into a very serious, high-intensity conventional conflict, and even have overlay of nuclear coercion and nuclear threats. What's interesting about it is not that they go stage by stage, but they can go up and down. So you can be in high-intensity conventional conflict, and literally within two or three days, you're in a ceasefire. That ceasefire can last a while, and all of a sudden it can break out again. Overlaid on top of that are nuclear alerts, aircraft flying strike missions around NATO, assassinations of leaders. So it's that combination that, to me, makes it unique in terms of hybrid. The other aspect is that the lower two sides of this spectrum, the Russians go out of their way to distance themselves and basically pretend that they really have almost nothing to do with it. This is sort of happening out here, and they're kind of observing it, maybe supporting people, but very intense effort. For example, in Crimea, for two or three months when the West was all trying to figure out who the hell these little green men were, you'd have the head of state, you'd have the head of the foreign ministry say, we don't know who they are, they're not us. And then within a month or two of those just direct denials, Putin's on a telethon and he goes, yep, those are my little green men. It was kind of cool. And they gave a more recent interview just the last 48 hours where he sort of bragged about it. And that's different. That essentially is a willingness to compromise the very concept of diplomatic integrity. So anyway, those are the four steps and I'm basically, I've organized my comments around that and then certainly happened to open up for questions or comments as we go through. If you look, I'm treating the events in the Donbass rather than Crimea. If you look at it after Crimea had been seized, there was a very intense information warfare campaign in Russian media, but which almost everyone in the Donbass watches. There's at least five television stations. There are more television stations from Russia showing there than there are Ukrainian stations. And the majority of the people speak Russian, though the idea of who speaks what in Ukraine is a little bit of a misnomer. And if you walk around the Ministry of Defense, 75% of everybody's talking in Russian, so it's not like this is just a small ethnic enclave. So, but there was this campaign of essentially protests. Large groups of people, they would sometimes bus people in from Rostov or Crimea to join the protests. Sometimes they got a little bit pushy or shovy, but basically it had all the markings of a legitimate protest movement along with a very vociferous information campaign. Then it started getting dark. Politicians were abducted. A senior politician's child was taken and daughter and taken to Moscow, and he had to negotiate her release. The guy that you see there on the grass is pulled out of his car, thrown in the trunk, and about two weeks later was found after he'd been tortured horrifically, I might add, along in a lake. In many of the towns and in and around the Donbass area, you'll have walls, and those walls are heartbreaking. It's pictures, have you seen my father? Have you seen my brother? Have you seen my son? My guess is that there's somewhere between one or 2,000 missing people that have just disappeared. Organizations such as Amnesty International have documented abductions and so forth. I had a chance to, in January, six weeks ago, I had a chance to go behind the lines and interview three members of the executive committee of the resistance in the Donbass. Jewish professor, who described how now he has an observer in all of his classes that some of his students have been recruited to report on his lectures and any student comments. A steel worker who was a separatist, wants the Donbass to be separate from Ukraine. But after the Chechen mercenaries abducted and raped his daughter, he's no longer on that side. And a businessman who is forcibly required to do business has to attend meetings. He has people in his office, or in his plant, who are stooges, basically people who report on everything that goes on. There is a Stalinist repression settling in the Donbass that virtually goes unnoticed in the Western press. At the, as March went on, and you had this protest, the Russians did something else. They mobilized the Russian army on the Eastern Ukrainian border and put about 80 battalions worth of combat equipment from Chernigov all the way around down as far as Rostov. I think there's fairly good evidence that they were exploring, or at least believed they had a quick run option to seize Kiev and essentially take over Ukraine, at least as far as the Nijepur. The Ukrainian army did something that has been virtually unreported. Remember, this army had been neglected for 15 years in a host of different governments. It had been essentially reduced to a territorial army and because they were on an old Russian basis, 75% of that army was on the west side of the Nijepur. They did the largest mobilization and redeployment of any army in Central or Western Europe since the end of World War II. Virtually miraculous. It moved 11 brigades from the west and got them up to the border. The Ukrainian General Staff Intelligence Department believes, I haven't seen the document myself, but believes that they have strong evidence that in the first week or so of April, the General Staff told Putin, we've lost the quick option. We can't just run and grab Kiev in 48 hours. We're gonna have to fight our way through. Now, many Russians didn't believe, I've had Russian generals tell me last spring, all the Ukrainians will never fight, or if they do, they won't fight more than a day or two and then kind of give in. But nonetheless, so the Putin faced, I think based on that information, Putin faced a choice. Does he launch an attack or does he take Plan B? And Plan B in this case was essentially a hybrid campaign in the Donbass. And all of a sudden, roughly at the same week that ostensibly the General Staff told him that the option had been lost for a quick grab, they start the seizure campaign. I was in Yefropotrosk with a group of Ukrainian military commanders when they took the first government building in Slovansk. And there was a discussion around the table and the Ministry of Interior commander said, these guys are really well armed. I sent my policeman up there, they got much better arms than my policeman. We can't take that building back, which is police. So then there was a discussion, how long would it take to get a armored unit there and how much fighting would be? And then the Air Force guy said, well, why don't we just, I can just have a plane go and bomb it. And then somebody else said, why don't we get created? We'll just take a truck bomb and we'll blow it up. And the argument was if you let the separatists or insurgents seize a government building and you don't take it back, then they're gonna seize more and more and more and more. About that time of this discussion, the senior officer comes into the room, having just talked to Kiev. And the interim government had had some furtive phone calls from the Washington and from Western Europe and said, don't do anything, don't be provocative. We'll talk to the Russians, we're gonna handle it, but don't do anything provocative. So, the Ukrainians didn't. And so it started off as one seizure, that's a yellow, became more and more. There's a pattern to it, in terms of taking over government buildings, police headquarters, communication facilities, and so forth. And it got more intense, so to the point where you basically had every town, center, was organized now and controlled by agents of the separatist side. Local policemen were assassinated or on the milder side, just so we know where you live, we know where your kids are, just expect you to go along. Probably about a third of the police were pro-separatist. A number of the SBU, internal ministry guys who had been in Kiev came from Donbass because Yanukovych was essentially the ward healer of the Donbass area, and so he had recruited a lot of his buddies to the special services. And when he fled, and these guys found themselves, at one minute, they're defending the government against protestors, and then the next minute, they're almost outlaws. So a lot of them went back home and served as a militant nucleus for some of the military activities. So if you look at it, in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, there were about 8 million people. In the current area, because it's both smaller, it's still contested, and because you had over a million people flee, it's down to about 4 million. But the amount of people who were actually involved in the seizure and the active activity was a fraction, a fraction of the overall population. If you go and talk to people, both in behind the lines or in cities that have since been liberated back by the government, the vast majority of people had complaints about a centralized government in Kiev. For example, the local governors are appointed by Kiev, they're not elected by the local people. It's kind of their rust belt. They were in high times during the Soviet period and sort of fallen on bad economic times in the region, has the highest alcoholism, highest suicide rate in Ukraine, so it's kind of a semi-depressed region. They have complaints, but the vast majority of people just want to live, they don't want to have a war in their backyard, they don't want to have their sons killed on one side or the other, they just want to go along and get along. But a relatively small group of people were able to essentially create a government. Here's two of the guys, these two fellows had been in Crimea, they were the number three, number four man who had pulled off the Crimean coup, and then they were brought in to organize the Donetsk. And here they are holding a press conference a week after, at the same table in front of the same map, they had paraded the OSCE observers who had been abducted and tortured. You hear stuff about right-wing guys in the Ukrainian side, you don't typically hear about a lot of right-wing guys on the other side. The right-wing phenomena is going throughout Europe. And calling it right or left, I think it's more it's a sort of a militant nationalism as opposed to particularly right or left. So here you have members of the Luhansk SWAT team and two brothers, and they're both neo-Nazis. And they're proud of it, they go on Facebook. This young man over here on the right has sort of a bit of a weird streak. He posted on his Facebook, beheading a puppy and eating it. So you get an element of the sort of macho nationalist. It's interesting in the last elections in Ukraine, on the Ukrainian side, the right nationalist crowd got less than 5% of the vote. By that comparison, France is a neo-Nazi haven. They got 15% or something out there. They've been in the Luhansk SWAT team they've now created the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics. And these are, this isn't an accidental name, like similarities with a ruling structure, not necessarily communist, but a ruling structure that I describe as Stalinist is very visible in both of those areas. And they're fairly clear about their objectives. They view themselves as the cutting edge of Novorossiya. And Novorossiya is Russia's, ought to be part of Russia. And they viewed as their stated objective when they started the new winter offensive on the 17th of January. The leader of the Donetsk group was very clear what his strategic objectives were. They want everything from Kharkiv all the way to Odessa. And initially they brought in a number of rough elements and they were so counterproductive in terms of their rapine and pillage of the local population. The Russians then brought in Chechen police and there's 40,000 of them who have signed a loyalty oath to Putin to help Russia police itself. And they came in and played hardball with their own guys. So this guy had his heart cut out and you can actually see the video of people playing volleyball with his heart. I'm not trying to gross people out, but if you want to have a sense of what's happening there, some of these images are the reality and we need to realize that. Putin has said that he doesn't care if an area has a minority Russian population. He has the right to defend them, to intervene for them and even incorporate that area that they're in even if they're a minority into Russia if that's what's necessary. So these give the percentages of ethnic Russians. So Novorossiya outside of Crimea would still be only a quarter. The Russians also, when you can read in the Vyantimesil Russian Journal of the General Staff, military thought, they're very clear about some of the military objectives in this area. Kharkiv is one of the major tank and automotive plants in Ukraine. Nipropetrosk, when I was at Nipropetrosk, you walk through the Usymosh missile factory and you actually have Russian ICBMs laying there being outfitted with Ukrainian technology. Also Nikolayev is one of the great ports on the Black Sea. So there are military objectives and they're very clear, not the only reason they're doing it but certainly it's a factor and they're very blunt about it. So in this process, there's a series of stages that they seem to be going through and I'll just kind of walk through these. Here you see, in March, the emphasis on protest. Then in April, seizures and then the violence and creating essentially a separate state in May. Along with it, in this map, by the way, you see a little white deal, those are infrastructure, those are bridges being blown. So a lot of infrastructure damage goes with it. In May then there begins a flood of Russian military equipment. And the amounts of it are so extensive. Of course, the narrative is, oh, they just captured these from the Ukrainians and so this isn't really Russian equipment. Because Ukraine inherited 99.9% of its military equipment from the old Soviet Union, there are probably 85% of the equipment is still common. So the argument is, oh, well, they just captured it. But in fact, there were areas where they were crossing the border. The Ukrainians were trying to control those. It ends up being about a dozen different crossing points. But here's puts a lie to the argument. I mean, we have the logbooks of the equipment being checked out of Russian storage facilities and concerns and being signed out. And also equipment that the Ukrainians didn't have. Of course, the separatists are some of the greatest mechanical geniuses in the world. They've actually, in the space of about two months, were able to do what no other country had done in two years or less than two years and build their own drones. These are, this is the suppressor that's only available on Russian Spetsnaz units. This is their level five body armor. I brought some back with me on the last trip. It appears that it stops not only the standard 223 western round but also 7.62 round. It's also available only to the airport. There's TV programs actively recruiting people and a large flow of money coming in to pay them. By June, there were whole columns of Russian armor coming across the border and photographed and documented. Ask yourself, up till now have you heard that on the 27th of June of last summer Putin ordered full mobilization of the army? How many people knew that? The mobilization order is on the presidential web page. So you then have a sequence of events that end in tragedy but start off, so this was the separatist area. Poroshenko, having been in power for a couple of months, tried to have a ceasefire, tried to negotiate. Nothing worked. So he then says, okay, I'm going to launch plan B. And his plan B was to take the Ukrainian army and concentrate it in the Donbass, not just protecting the overall border. So he had four brigades sweep through the southern part along the border to try to establish border control. Michael Zabrowski, the commander of the 95th Air Assault Brigade, by the way, a graduate of R. Leavenworth, everybody either in Ukraine, the separatists, the Russians all credit the 95th as the best unit in Ukraine. The 95th had also served with US forces in Iraq. Zabrowski launches the largest and longest armored raid in recorded history. He broke through the front, that's the dotted line, separated the two sides, came down, and then went all on the 450 kilometer armored, full-side armored brigade movement. That opened up the corridors then for them to basically reduce these areas. About the same time, the Russians realized that if they didn't intervene, the separatist cause was going to be collapsed. So starting in mid-July, they began cross-border fires of artillery. There are about 40 of those incidents where they fired across. The Ukrainians were told by Western leaders, do not fire back. That would be provocative. In fact, there was a decision made in the United States to not give Ukrainians up-to-date, accurate intelligence imagery so that they couldn't do cross-border counter-battery fires. So they just had to sit and take it. In one fire strike, in less than three minutes, two entire battalions were wiped out with Russian thermobaric warheads. This was not just an occasional shelling. This was extremely intense combat. I think what's going on in Ukraine is peak intensity excels the intensity, say, of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which was in its time a benchmark for intensity. As the Ukrainians were almost ready to sever the two different parts, the Russians intervened. They hit their Ukrainian brigade. This was intervened on the 24th of August. While Ukraine was celebrating its National Independence Day and having a parade in Kiev, they never saw it coming. No one bothered to warn them from the west. The Russians swept in and literally rolled up four brigades and they got caught in what was called the cauldron of the Ilyubovsk. They held out for several days under intense artillery fire. Then Putin offered them a humanitarian exit, but they had to leave their heavy equipment. They started down the road carrying Russian wounded, by the way. The lead element of the column got out, but then they hit it with artillery fire. The Russians had promised if the Ukrainians surrendered to them, they would not turn them over to the separatists. They violated that one as well. The separatists went in. By the way, the separatists did not take wounded. So if you're wounded, you're dead. If you're lucky it's a bullet. If it's a Chechen who gets you and you're wounded, they slit your throat. So anyway, there's this big pocket. The front's wide open and they broke out and basically drove until they ran out of supplies because, frankly, I don't think they expected that amount of success. That brought us then to the ceasefire of 5 September, otherwise known as Minsk-1. I'm going to come back to that, but I'd just like to stop and take a little bit, Paul sort of addressed some of your bigger questions about Russia. What's Russia been up to in terms of their restructuring or their forces and how do we see that playing in Ukraine? So Russia used to have about 17 military districts in their retrenchment mode. They've moved down to four, basically. And then their internal arguments, they argue, well, in the West we have sort of a high-tech threat, in the East we've got a mass threat, and in the South we have sort of unconventional threats so we need to have a force that can cover a wide spectrum of capability. They've been very blunt. They've taken a page right out of our, or NATO's strategy in the 50s. We don't have enough, we can't afford our old, large conventional armies, so we're going to depend on tactical nuclear weapons for defense and we're going to design our armies so it can be fluid and use low-yield tactical nuclear weapons in defense of our territory. So those of us who grew up with the Soviet Army, 207 divisions, now there's only two divisions left. The second mechanized and fourth armored, our fourth tank, but in the process they've been creating these independent brigades. The intent was to have them be an all-volunteer force or what they call a contract force. For the specialists, but it just didn't work because they didn't get enough volunteers. So they had enough people to fill out the airborne and Spetsnaz and some of the more technical services like a tank and artillery crews, but the basic infantry is still conscript. So that was sort of a flaw in their logic if you will, and they designed these new units to be operated on dispersed fields and they created what they call a battalion tactical group. And essentially what they're doing is driving combined arms. Everybody in the West has combined arms at brigade level and we typically will cross-assign a tank company to the infantry and vice versa. But what they've done down at the battalion level is they're actually permanently assigning artillery air defense and armor with mechanized infantry. And they train as that unit, so it's not an ad hoc combination, it's a fixed organization. And they call that a battalion tactical group and we're gonna hear a lot more about it because that's what they've been using in Ukraine. One of the problems they found first in Chechnya and they sort of modified it was conscript infantry don't work really well in their system. They're not motivated, they don't want to be there, they're not particularly well trained, they take a lot of casualties, and oh by the way, they have lots of mothers. And mothers complain when their sons are squandered in foreign battlefields and they're pretty vocal about it. So they go, we gotta have an alternative. So when they went into Georgia, they did a different action. The lead elements, you'd have a situation where you'd have a T-90 tank going down the road with a bunch of airborne guys on the top of it. And you go, that's weird, why not the mechanized infantry and their BMPs with the tank? Well because they wanted the contract guys who were better trained, more hire motivated to be in the lead element. And then the conscripts just sort of follow in and do security after things have been secured. That is a pattern we see repeatedly now in eastern Ukraine. So you'll see units that the sort of, the technical structure of the unit is essentially Russian. It's Russian commanded, the signal officer is Russian, most of the tank crews are Russian, most of the artillery, at least the officers and the senior sergeants are Russian. But the infantry can come from a wide variety of sources. They can be extremely well trained people like Spetsnaz or Airborne, or they can basically be for hire mercenaries or locals. They just released a whole bunch of guys from prison in Donetsk. And so some of these guys are now serving as this sort of cannon fodder infantry. And also then separatists. So, and I don't think the purpose is to, is necessarily to disguise their role. Purpose is basically to have cannon fodder, so you're not killing a bunch of Russian conscript kids. But it has the effect of adding a lot of confusion. So when Sakur says, oh well there's Russian units that you're operating against or you're fighting against, and then the Ukrainian chief of staff says, well no, we're not fighting Russians, we're fighting separatists. Both of them are right. Both of them are right. Because in the same unit you have this sort of, sort of think of as the M&M version. You have the hard shell of Russian assets and structure and inside the soft chocolate you have the cannon fodder. Another interesting phenomenon is that they have now introduced 48 of these battalion tactical groups either on the border of Ukraine or in Ukraine. Right now my guess is there's about, it's about half and half, about 24 in the Donbass and about 24 along the border. And you look at it and it's weird. Just like seeing airborne guys right on tanks and you're being behind, this is weird. Instead of taking and using brigade organizations, so you take a brigade with three or four battalions and you have him go to the, take a sector on the front, instead they're taking one battalion out of a brigade and sending it to the front. Almost never to battalions. So say well why would they do that? Well, it gives you your best officers and best trained guys, I guess. It means you leave your conscripts at home. But it's a very strange way to run a military organization. Not only that, they're not just doing this from the brigades that are local to Ukraine, they're bringing them from Sakhalin, curiles. They're bringing units from Murmansk. It's the weirdest hodge podge assortment I've ever seen of any army. So what you have is where normally you would think, okay 48 battalion groups would be roughly the equivalent of 12 brigades. Instead of 12 brigades lined up, you got 48 individual battalion tactical groups. And the Russians have talked about this in their literature over the last few years how difficult it is to have Hispanic control. No kidding. But their argument, the counter argument to that is that's the nature of this new type of war. You're going to be operating on very dispersed areas. And so the idea of a hierarchical structure where you have two or three or four units report and organize it by threes or fours is wrong for this new environment. As they send forces to the front, they send massive amounts of supplies. These battalion tactical groups are not heavy in logistics. So they'll be in a fierce fight for four or five days and they'll use up a lot of ammunition, phenomenal amount of ammunition. And then all of a sudden they kind of go quiet. Maybe with just some harassing fire. And then they'll be quiet for four or five days till the next humanitarian convoy comes along and then within about 48 hours after the convoy's arrived, all of a sudden they're off firing several units of fire every day. It's literally a sickle collect. And you can plot it to the convoy. The rail traffic in Russia, particularly running through Rostov, but also up higher through Kursk, is some of the heaviest flow of military equipment seen since World War II by rail. What's interesting is the rail traffic now goes through Rostov and then comes directly into the Donbass and is offloaded just a few kilometers outside of the city of Donetsk. One of the reasons that the big battle of Debaltsevo was fought is it's a major rail hub and a highway hub as well. And the Ukrainians were trying to have that be an easy access route. This is one month, or basically five weeks, worth of equipment documented coming into the Donbass last fall. 890 major items of equipment. But of course the Ukrainians got nothing from the West. They say, well, how do you know that it's really there? It's there. You just take your handy radio shag drone and fly it over and you can spot the tracks and the snow. It's also sort of interesting. This, by the way, is a Ukrainian video from a Ukrainian UAV. But every one of these pictures, the vehicle is located next to civilian housing. So when I was in the south, and we wanted to try and find the T90s that were reported, it intervened along the southern coast, they were there and they were essentially in an apartment complex of high rises parked in between the buildings. So there's an intentional effort to try to hide the military equipment or if not hide it, sequester it among civilian targets so then if it's it, you're hitting civilians. This is based on Ukrainian data. By the way, there is a difference between Ukrainian data and various Western intelligence agencies. I have never found the Ukrainians lying to me or misleading me. They're very open about what their numbers are, how they get them. That doesn't mean they're always right. But the idea that they sort of want to inflate everything just to pander for Western help or something, I have an experience with the exception of their casualty numbers. And their casual reporting, I don't think it's necessarily intentional, but it's based on the casualties that were received the day of reporting. But casualties who then died in the hospital don't get added back to that total. Likewise, missing in action don't get reported or prisoners of war. So I think you could probably, realistically, double the number of losses on the Ukrainian side in terms of people who aren't going to come back than the popular number. But it's a large amount of equipment. And this is what's gone into the, the proxies had virtually no equipment of their own. So if you want to know what was introduced to the Don Boss, you look at the combination of those two. And then much of this has been added along the border. Basically, I was at the Southern Command headquarters in Yemper Petrosk with a commanding general, and he was showing me this slide. I've modified it a little bit, but taken some stuff off, but basically it's his slide. And this was about three days before the winter offensive started, but you could sense something was coming. And so each of these sort of amoebas inside the Don Boss represent about five battalion tactical groups, and then there's six battalion tactical groups in the four amoebas outside along the border. Ukrainians had their brigades stretched around. They only had a couple in reserve. And what they were worried about was a breakout in six directions. In fact, when the winter offensive came, that's exactly where they went. The view of the Ukrainian front commanders was if the Russians succeeded in, or the offensive succeeded in more than two of them, it could rupture the entire front. The first week of the winter offensive took Donetsk Airport. Then there was heavy fighting at Debaltseva fell. So those two objectives have been achieved. They're clearly trying to make a major effort at Mariupol. We can talk about that. Also, they're trying to break out across the Sovarsky River. I don't think they're going to be successful there personally, but this map is now misleading in that the Ukrainians lost, took some heavy losses at the airport and also at Debaltseva. They have committed every single brigade on that map to the front now, except for the 14th, which was the old 51st brigade that was wiped out at Ilyivosk and is being reformed. So it's not even an active combat-worthy unit. There are no more reserves left. Everything has been thrown out front. Many of the units are at half strength. There's 35 ministry of interior battalions. It counts border guards, territorials and volunteers. 25 of those are at the front, and many of them are probably most of them are now down at company strength. The Ukrainians are low on artillery ammunition. So it's going to be a much more fragile environment. The dotted line is where you would have the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts as one entity. There's an argument, and it's an interesting one, that that is their intermediate objective, because once they get to that area, then there's a belief that they and the Russians have an agreement that the Russians will recognize that entity as a state and have an alliance with it, which will then authorize its deployment of Russian, overt Russian military forces to it. And the model, by the way, is what happened in Ostetia, which was culminated just about a week ago. Now, that does not necessarily mean it's the end of combat operations. If the front breaks open to the west, there's basically no terrain feature short of this line. Notice the fall. This is tank country. When the ground is dried in another six weeks, that's wide open Blitzkrieg country. And there is no discernible natural defense line there if you fall off the current defense line. So it's wide open. To the northwest, there's a series of rivers, but one objective is ostensibly Kharkiv. So a breakout to the northwest could either swing around Nyepr-Patrosk or head north. If the Russians decided to intervene, which they could, the forces could outflank Kharkiv and link up with these guys. That would give them a land link to Crimea, basically take everything south of Poltava and east of the Nyepr and give them the option if they want to go all the way to Transnistia. So the potential for dramatic change is there. I'm not predicting it, but it is there. I've been wrong just about every month except for twice. When General Clark and I spent three hours with a full session of the House Armed Services Committee on the 23rd of July, I made the mistake of predicting that the Russians would attack in August and they did. And then I made a similar prediction just before Christmas and they did. So I'm not predicting what can happen, but that army is getting very, that front is getting extremely fragile and there are not the natural terrain obstacles for fallback positions. And so as that army gets pushed off its current defenses, the front expands and the terrain opens up, which is not a good sign. I'll talk a little briefly about the Winter War. This is, as of 4th of February when I was there, this is where Ukrainian intelligence had, the east of those little arrows is one of those battalion tactical groups. These sort of pink amoebas are the locations of battalion-sized separatist units. So you can see that the battalion tactical groups were actually in the lead and virtually all of the fighting. They'd already taken Donetsk Airport here and they were trying to cut off a de Balsovet. What happened to de Balsovet was described very quickly. The 25th just got bled out so they put the 128th in, brought the 80th around, brought the 30th around from here. So you had three full brigades into that pocket. It got some of the most intense combat Europe is, I think it is the most intense combat Europe. I don't think anything even in the Balkans matched it. The 128th did not get out of the pocket with any of its equipment. The guys that got out walked out. Brigade with over 100 armored vehicles came out with nothing. The 25th, which is normally have BRDMs, armored vehicles has none left. At the airport I was there and had a chance to be with the kids. I was at Pitsky, which was about a kilometer away from the airport and that was sort of the staging area. I had a chance to talk to the kids who went in and ended up being the last that none of them got out. It is a very intense combat. This is the airport. This is what used to look like one of the most modern airports in Europe and you see each of them massively destroyed. When the Chechens went in, they slit the throats of all the wounded. They held it out for 240 days. One of the things I want to raise is, I know this is a forum on Russia, but it is worth asking, why do the Ukrainians keep getting in this situation? That is, they put up a really good defense. They fight like hell. They give three to four times as many casualties as they receive in a fixed battle. Then they end up getting in a pocket and then the pocket is destroyed or if they get out they lose all their equipment in the process. I think it is explainable. This is me at standing at this crossroads. That is an arrow of view. What you have here in this front is not a linear defense. It is a whole series of strong points. The strong points can be four to five kilometers apart. The problem is Ukraine does not have any effective anti-tank guided missiles for their infantry. If you are going to try and stop a tank, and the reason is the stock that they have, first of all, we paid them to get rid of a lot of their stocks in the 90s. Secondly, and also a lot of their air defense SA-7s, much to their regret now, and a huge amount of ammunition. The old anti-tank guided missiles they have, the syntax is timed out, so only about one and three actually go off. If you want to stop a tank attack, you need to really dig in, and when you get hit and the tank starts to overrun you, as they drive by, then you fire from behind, because every tank in the Donbass has reactive armor. Those are metal boxes with explosives. When the missile hits, the box explodes out and deforms the heat jet on the missile. It is very effective. That is me on the top. The RPG hits and one AT-5 hit on it, and none of them had penetrated. This is a Russian, by the way, T-64B tank. This is the first one that an outsider confirmed, because I crawled in the tank, read the serial number, went back to Kiev, went through the records, and this tank was never in service with the Ukrainian Army. It had always been a Russian tank. But basically, they don't have any way of stopping that armor. So what happens then? Here's another position. This is, by the way, shot from a Russian drone. That's the drone there, the guy carrying it. They dig in a position. They have some artillery. They have to penny-pack their tanks out, because the infantry can't stop armor. So instead of having your own armor as a counter-attack force or a mobile reserve, it's like the French did in 1940. It's a stupid strategy, but you don't have any choice, because you have to have something to stop armor, and the infantry don't. So what happens is one or two of these things along this front get overrun, and then you're outflanked, and next thing there's a pocket, and you're stuck in the pocket. And then all the artillery zeroes in on you, and the pocket closes, and then you're forced into a breakout, and the breakout usually means that you lose all your heavy equipment, because the guys just go out at night through the woods because you can't get your survival, your heavy equipment. So when people talk in Washington, and these wonderful abstract tones about, well, you know, is it escalatory for us to give anti-tank weapons to the Ukrainians? Basically, they need what's called a tandem warhead. You have javelin or toe-two, which has two warheads. So the first warhead explodes the reactive armor, and the second warhead burns through the tank. We have these sort of abstract discussions, but what's killing that army is their inability to stop mechanized forces, or to react when there's a breakthrough or an outflanking. One could say that the failure of the ceasefire, which I'll get to in a minute, of Minsk-1, was a direct result of two decisions. One, by Putin to keep supplying and fueling the conflict, and secondly, done here in Washington, because we refuse to give the Ukrainians ever since summer any of these anti-tank weapons. They don't want as a gift, they want to buy them. And when we won't give them to them, no other allies who have them will give them to them without our permission. But this is about done. Quickly, I mentioned artillery. There's lots of it. It's very lethal. The Russians are using lots amount of MLRS with canister warheads. In the 80s, we thought we had an advantage with these top-attack munitions. Typically, we said it was from four to ten times more effective as high-explosive. Then along came Princess Dye and the concern about mines being left on third-world battlefields. So you have the Princess Dye convention. We're getting rid of all of our systems. We're going back to high-explosive. But of course, the Chinese and the Russians haven't signed that. This is what it does. That entire battalion was destroyed in three minutes. Combination of top-attack and thermobaric high-explosive. This is the ceasefire. Now, if you look at that chart, that's a daily plot of major combat. That's at least 100 artillery strikes to count as one event or 100 people involved. To be classed as an event. To call what happened, Minsk won a ceasefire is to defy all normal meaning of the English language. There are real problems with the ceasefire. The OSC was never designed to be a monitoring force like this. It was designed for people who were having, like a marriage counselor. Not a referee in this kind of brawl. When the fighting starts, they leave. They just announced that they're increasing their staff to 350 people. You couldn't monitor that ceasefire with 3,500. They only monitored two of the border crossings. I can identify 12 major border crossings where the equipment's flowing through. When I was at Mary Opal, there were more Russians members, the Russians are members of the OSC teams, and there were more Russians in the team than there were Western Europeans. They're walking around and standing in a Ukrainian position with their cell phone, typing in the coordinates. This is not an organization to have any kind of meaningful monitoring. They went out and got four RPVs, and the Russians have a very interesting electronic warfare device that actually can project electronic beams and take them out. Minstu will fail if we try to have this system. Minstu is a... a ceasefire was needed for everybody concerned, the people, the Ukrainians, and so forth. God help us when we have politicians who don't know about military issues, and they then invent the rules for a ceasefire. They said, oh, we're going to move the heavy equipment, the artillery and tanks, 50 to 70 kilometers on each side of the line. So what that means is that the line of separation is a bunch of strong points that can't hold anything except an infantry attack. So now, if one side decides that they want to take military advantage of that, you can cross that 100 kilometers in a couple of hours. Now, the Ukrainians don't have any strategic intelligence. They don't have any of monitoring, and the OSCE purposely has a week-long delay in giving them information, and any intel they get from us in NATO has a lag time. But we're talking about a lag time in hours. So if the separatists get a four-hour start, they will be through that infantry screen and into the rear, and then it's going to be one big meeting engagement with a wide open front and no clear defensive. It is a game plan. You could not design a disaster better than Merkel and Holland gave us. I won't go into the Russians have been playing issues with nuclear weapons. I'm happy to talk about it later. Some lessons. I've hit most of these. This is about the political. We in the West really aren't set up for this. Our idea of special forces is Rambo, eating snakes. Their idea of a special forces guy is a guy who wears factory stuff, maybe he carries a little Mark Koff in his back pocket, but Meek, Myle probably wears glasses. He's an agent. He's an organizer. He's connected. He builds a cell, and he gives that cell to build other cells. That is the kind of warfare that goes on at the first stage. I've hit most of the points in terms of the battle issues. Battlefield is not linear. I didn't go into a number of other issues. One thing, Mary Opel and the commander are standing next to me and he says, hear that noise? I go, no. Look up and about a thousand feet up is a drone. He said, we have ten minutes to get under cover. Ten minutes, so we walk away. It was probably fifteen minutes. That entire position was destroyed in a fire strike. The Russians have broken the code on reconnaissance strike complex at least at the tactical operational level. I have been with units. For the afternoon I was with them, they were overflowed no less than eight times by drones. This is the new robotic world out there. It is striking what's happening, and not just in terms of Russia, but in terms of the whole nature of war, when you combine them with precision accuracy and then the massive conventional lethality. I've hit basically most of the points. Bear with me just for my last point. The victim of hybrid aggression is also victimized by western caution and pervercation. While Russia has introduced thousands of weapons to the conflict, European and American political hesitation in helping Ukraine acquire replacements for its losses, and the political message it sends to others who would like to help them, serves as a virtual military embargo on the victim. Ironically, the most successful western sanction has been against the people who we call our friends. Thank you. Thank you so much, Phil, for that very highly illuminating and informative presentation, and also quite a disturbing presentation as well. But like I said, when I invited you here, I think you've demonstrated that you've been able to say things that nobody else is really talking about in the media in general and things that I felt, and I'm sure you agree, needed wider dissemination and wider discussion. Now, given the limited time available, I'm going to forego the exercise and the usual moderators' prerogative of asking the first question and open this up for discussion from the floor. If you want to speak, ask a question, please raise your hand, and if possible, state your affiliation and we'll try to get as many of them as possible. And since we're going to run a little bit over, I'm going to leave it open for a little bit longer than scheduled. If you need to leave, please feel free to do so. Yes, Andy. You remember the slide I showed where they're bringing all these elements from brigades all over Russia? Yeah. People ought to study that. First of all, a third of their army is in opposite the Chinese border and it isn't going anywhere except for occasional battalions. Another third of it is essentially between the Urals and the Volga. So there's a reason that they were taking those pieces in and not using real brigades. And I think the reason is that they don't want to put conscripts. They don't want to put Russian-drafted kids into that kind of maelstrom. Could they bring those in? Yeah. And they could double. So if there's 48 battalion tactical groups right now, they could get up to 80. Within a month of redeployment. Over three months, they might get up to 120. If the Ukrainians were just where they were at the beginning of this conflict with the addition of anti-tank weapons, they could certainly hold against 80 battalion tactical groups. The problem is that every day the Ukrainians are getting weaker. If we had sent a hundred Javelin and a tow two, I don't think you would have had the winter offensive last fall. It is truly a self-fulfilling prophecy. So can the Russians escalate? Yeah. But at what cost to their own... What happens when people use that imagery, we think about, oh, it's the Russian army with 220 divisions. They can roll steamroll on anybody. Well, that is not the case. I mean, it's amazing that the Ukrainians did as well as they did in holding this last offensive. And in battle after battle, as long as the Ukrainians don't get enveloped and caught in a pocket, they're inflicting three to four times as many casualties as they're receiving. And that's documented. So is Russia bigger than Ukraine? Yeah. Is their army bigger than the Ukrainians? Yeah. Can they bring that whole army to bear it? No. Is that army... Does all of that army look the same? No. It's interesting. You walk through the units that they've lost. They lost an entire regiment of the 76th Airborne. They've lost two or three of their... I'm talking about decimates. I'm talking about wiped out of their best Bessonost brigades. So the cream of the Russian crop, a lot of that has been... Their best trained guys have been killed in very intense combat. So I think that is a truism that's an excuse. Is Russia bigger? Yeah. Does that mean that there's no hope for anybody? They can roll over NATO too? I mean, no. It's... What can the defender do to... Now, unfortunately, the longer time goes on and the weaker the Ukrainian army gets, what they need is more. So last summer, a couple hundred javelins or a tow too. If this thing, just in the anticipation, it may open up. Having dismounted anti-tank guided missile launchers is not enough now. You need the tow two on the M1-13. You need some kind of mobile platform to be able to use it. Last summer, I would have been content. I was content in front of the house to say, we had five items, only one of them was lethal and that was anti-tank weapons. The other was counter-battery radar and surveillance drones and so forth. Now, if I was asked, I would say, we got a couple thousand Bradley's sitting out with nobody to man them. I started sending Bradley's over because they need the armor and they need the anti-armor capability and the mobility. They didn't need that four months ago because they had enough of their own. The longer it goes on, the tougher it is that it's going to be to help them. There's a couple of chivalrous. One is this massive one. The other one is escalation. That's the one I find. I'm pretending you asked that question. That's the one I find most obscene. They bring in tanks and then it's escalatory if we give the Ukrainians anti-tank weapons. They bring in a thousand tubes of artillery but it's escalatory if we give the Ukrainians long-range counter-battery radar. They have drones flying over the place like it's as busy as Kennedy Airport and we can't give the Ukrainians some drones so they can see what's going on. It is just an obscene argument. Anyway, there's some more questions. I won't get too carried away. Thank you for asking my pretend question. Thank you again for the presentation. It was great. I'm John Caves at National Defense University. Speaking of escalation, how significant do you think the nuclear dimension is to the Russia's willingness to engage in this kind of aggression? And if it is significant, should there be a nuclear dimension to the Western response? Could you repeat the last cap? If the nuclear dimension is important to Russia's willingness to engage in this type of aggression, should the Western response include a nuclear dimension? I'm going to cheat and go back a couple of slides because I think it's easier to actually talk to the chart. This is actually from a Russian article in 99 where they talked about, and they came up with this theory called escalate to de-escalate, or nuclear de-escalation. I read it ago. It turns on your head everything we thought we knew about strategic deterrence. But to sort of draw the distinction, where say, for example, under NATO's flexible response, we would have a tactical escalation, almost quasi-symbolic, then some battlefield, then it might go deeper, it was called deliberate escalation, then you generally respond, but it was staged up. Their argument is no, you pick the point at which you think the opponent will be so impressed, will lose will, and that's the point that you either threaten or use. Now, maybe down here, if you're kind of against somebody who doesn't have any nukes in a kind of weak vote, you're going to go, you don't even have to have a demonstration try it. If you get on the phone and do what Putin did to Poroshenko and threaten him. I wasn't in the conversation, but I'm told that it was a direct nuclear threat by Putin to Poroshenko, which is sort of ironic given the Budapest agreement. Not only do they violate the Budapest agreement, they're actually threatening a nuclear fire against the victim. The Russians are building or are deploying a wide range. Daddy Bush and Yeltsin had the agreement at Vladivostok to get rid of, it was one of the great non-arms control agreements of all time. It was the mutual unilateral reduction of tactical nuclear weapons. So we got rid of about 10,000, kept 361 air-delivered bombs. They had around 20,000. They've come down to around 5,000. About half of that force is modernized. Smaller warheads, sub-kiloton, and they're putting them on a wide range of things. They're putting them on SAMs. They're putting them on artillery. They're putting them on torpedoes. Now, so they're serious about, I mean, they are at least having adopted the concept of we don't have enough conventional forces to defend all of our territory. Therefore, we need to do that. They've certainly built that option. If I was Chinese, I would say, yeah, you better respond with similar capability if you want to, if you think you're going to fight those guys. For us, if we're planning on defending in Europe, then we need to rethink it. But having lived through the ER debate and the INF debate, I'm sort of at the point, this is me personally, they don't want to be defended. It's okay with me. But if we have people in interest that we think are important enough that we and the Russians might actually get in conflict with each other, there's two conditions that are, I think, inarguably true about tactical nuclear weapons. Because there's a huge debate, and most people think that they're not useful, but there's two conditions where they're decisive. One is when one side has them and the other doesn't. That's pretty clear. The other is when both sides have them, it tends to make such a mess of the battlefield nobody moves around, you turn Blitzkrieg into Sitzkrieg. So if you think that we're going to be in a situation where we're going to confront them, they are decisive when they got them and we don't. And 300 air-delivered gravity bombs are not a nuclear capability, particularly when they come from a half-dozen airfields that can be preempted conventionally, let alone with nuclear strikes. That is not a serious tactical nuclear capability if you're talking about doing that. Did I hit most of your points? Yeah, I was just going to get over it, but I think in a sense, possibly since Russia is very nuclear minded to use a lot of threats, they're very conscious, they can't be out-tested. They won't be willing to take these kinds of risks. That's not what it's going to be getting at. And second, if there was a nuclear dimension, in other words, the show, for example, NATO, maybe normal lines in the center of European allies, rules and missions within the nuclear mission and the alliance, just to say that there's a... we're not ignoring this aspect of it. But I just, it was really just wondering as to whether it's important to have the Russians or willing to take these kind of risks? I think anybody who plays that game needs their head examined, because they are playing Russian roulette. Excuse the pun. But I mean, you are letting loose forces that are just... and you're doing it... in some of their exercises, they ran, I think it was part of the pod, 2009, they assumed we were reinforcing Europe. So in their play, they assumed... so they hit Norfolk with a cruise missile, but that wasn't a strategic exchange. And you go, I mean, I don't know what universities, these guys are living on, but it... are they articulating it? Have they built a force structure to try to implement it? And when a push comes to show, are they crazy enough to do it? I hope not. On that note, I'm afraid that's going to have to be the last question. Dr. Carber has another engagement after this. We need to make sure he gets there on time. So I really want to thank you, Dr. Carber, for just a fabulous presentation, very informative. And I know I learned a lot, and I hope the rest of you guys did. And thank you all and to all of you for coming. And I look forward to hosting you again for the next edition of the Russian Military Forum. Thanks.