i am included in the group of people who overestimated russia's uh abilities uh what
i my expectations for them were much more than what we have seen so far they're not stupid so
i anticipate that they will eventually if given time correct some of the mistakes and so you know
kind of the crux of what i want to say today is we do not want to give them time to fix all their
problems and and get going again i do believe we're in the decisive phase of the campaign that
in other words what happens in the next three or four weeks uh could very well determine
what happens for the next three or four years ukraine is going to win i'll say that up front
eventually they're they're going to win russia has already lost in so many different ways and so many
levels regardless of how many more um how much longer they're able to keep firing artillery at
innocent people and destroying villages and cities in my assessment even though we've got many many
many tough weeks ahead in my assessment russia will culminate by the end of this summer so
august september and ukraine will be able to go back onto the offensive and push russia
back to the 23 february line now i say that for a couple reasons we know that war is a test of will
and it's a test of logistics and the ukrainian logistical situation gets better with each day as
as all of the aid that the us and the uk and other nations are providing as that builds up and starts
getting into the hands of ukrainian soldiers then their situation gets better now we still got
we got a lot of work to do here but you can feel it's getting better on the other hand the russians
they have terrible manpower shortages but the big the first red flag was when they started asking
for syrian volunteers to come fight they have a broken mobilization system so they have decided
not to try and do a general mobilization and they just don't have enough troops to do all that they
set out to try and do and they won't be able to control even the territory that they have taken so
far the sanctions are beginning to to take effect i'm talking specifically sanctions that prevent
the russians from getting the necessary components to replace the precision munitions that they have
already expended i don't believe that sitting on the other side of the border that there are
a second third wave of people and new equipment ready to come in they just don't have it they
haven't invested in it the the corruption and the ministry of defense over the dead past decades
has left them in a situation now where and this is all being exposed so in other words ukraine has
the moral high ground they have the will they're defending their homeland they're defending their
families they've got a very good manpower situation they have no manpower shortages
their shortages are in artillery and artillery ammunition and in other systems to attack deep
to destroy russian artillery and rocket launchers the russians on the other hand
don't have the will not down at the soldier level
they do have the will at the top president putin obviously is willing to expend as many lives as
necessary to achieve what he wants to achieve but i don't think that they have the logistics to keep
this uh what they're doing right now and so this logistical situation is going to improve in the in
the favor of ukrainians and i believe that by the end of the summer that they will be on the offense
driving russia back to the 23 february line last thing it was so important that secretary austin
said what he did the other day when he talked about we're going to help ukraine win that that is
important that's an end state that will drive all of us to do everything we can to help ukraine win
20 years in iraq and afghanistan i never heard the word win a single time it was never a policy
state statement it was always you know prevent terrorism or um dif
different things never win and this this is important and then the other word he
used was weaken to weaken russia to the point that it can no longer threaten its neighbors
now both of these have made some people uncomfortable but of course secretary austin is
secretary of defense he didn't just pull that out out of his pocket this is a policy decision by the
united states government and the administration i think has done a very good job working with allies
so being able to explain when and weaken and keeping the alliance together unified in this
effort this is why i am optimistic that ukraine is in fact going to win so that's why we can't stop
i mean that's why it was important to say when equals russia out back to the 23 february line
because if we don't then ukraine um their economy will have a very hard time without the the ability
to export grain and of course this is part of the design by the kremlin putin wants to see ukraine
erased as a state even the idea of ukraine is a state so he's doing what he can to make sure
that their economy is trashed and in the occupied territories making people use rubles as a currency
all the different things and he's also deported about half a million ukrainians into russia
out of ukraine so this is classic stalinist style uh completely changing the landscape
so i think that the ability of russia to continue large-scale offensive operations is is on the
clock they just they don't have it i think they restarted this offensive too soon there's no way
they had time to repair the damage to all the units what we call reconstitution where you take
units have been beaten up or they're tired or have to replace equipment this takes time and you know
you bring in new people new leaders you've got to train together you got to learn to fight together
they haven't had that time so i think that they they just jam people back in there into the line
trying to push it forward they still are not fighting as a what we would call a joint force
you don't see air land and sea and special forces operating in a synchronized manner where air power
is first of all the first priority for air power is to get air superiority to to knock the enemy
out of the sky the russians have failed to fail but the huge number of
advantage they have and the ability to fly out of safe pretty safe bases inside russia and belarus
have not been able to get air superiority that points to the fact that while they may have a lot
of airplanes they don't have a lot of good pilots that are trained properly that know how to do this
and they don't even think in terms of joint air support for ground operations where's the
navy i mean the navy other than launching some missiles from uh 70 80 miles away in the cities
has done zero they have they have done zero to contribute to the fight i had expected this was
part of my failed uh or my early overestimation i expected them to be conducting enough
amphibious operations all up and down the black sea coast i mean that's the huge advantage that
they had the ability to to go and pick a place put their naval infrastructure ashore
and outflank ukrainian land forces they haven't done it i don't think and especially now that
ukrainians have have displayed the ability to sink a ship a major ship from distance
the russian navy has no desire to get in close and so if they're not able to do that
then i don't think we're going to see an amphibious operation towards odessa
and certainly all their land operations have failed so far they can't get past mikaela and
so that's why i think yes they've got a lot of artillery a lot of rockets
yes they are whittling away attributing ukrainian forces in that southeastern part of ukraine but
this is going to change we started too late we started too late to get serious about delivering
capability that they needed i mean you and everybody listening will remember it was
only about two months ago that we were still arguing about whether or not to give stinger
to the ukrainians how silly does that seem now so at least now we're talking about artillery drones
long-range systems getting that into the hands of ukrainians
and that's how they're going to defeat russian artillery russian rockets that's going to turn the
tide we're complete with a low play at this time passing 0.70 looking at rgb linking via septum