And that's what we've been trying to deal with for all these years, because that's always been considered as something which Ukraine needs to address and its allies needs to address, because those wars are extremely high on casualties and very, very difficult to win. NATO would have a very different setting completely. NATO would make sure that when the enemy arriving, adversary arrives to the front, they're in the worst possible shape and perhaps not arriving in a one piece at all. So they would use the long-range weapons, they would use the aviation, they would use all kind of a long-range sort of capabilities possible and as long as possible order to keep the first echelon, to keep the infantry intact as much as possible. And that's the whole war fighting doctrine of NATO is all about. So essentially, you know, since perhaps the, you know, World War II and then early wars such as war in Korea, war in Vietnam. Since then, the focus on the long-range weapons was a key. And that's why it's extremely painful, I have to say, there's been to look at those decisions made about the allowing Ukraine to strike on the Russian territory, because those decisions, when they weren't made, and I have to remind that we're almost three years into the war, and several years we've been pushing for provisions of the long-range weapons, and then months and months we've been pushing for allowing to strike to the Russian territory. So all these decisions, they essentially just put more burden on the infantry. So they're putting more burden on the people who are on the front. I don't want to say unfair burden, but this is certainly a burden which would NATO never put on its own troops, ever. So that's basically the biggest dilemma right now, how still to provide capabilities to Ukrainian forces that they can actually fight modern war. The war, according to the approaches which would be taken by its partners. And we're still not there. So apart from drones, which is obviously a huge innovation of this war, unseen before, the operation sighting of this war is extremely old-fashioned. And this is more you would rather see that in like tens of years ago rather than now. That's the biggest thing which breaks hearts of people who are dealing with this because they know that we could avoid that rate of casualties. We could have avoided those problems with mobilization, but we're still kind

of still struggling

with this.

Since you brought it up there straight away, we do seem to be in this weird, I don't know, weird, but it's this moment of sudden change, really. And it seems to have come about since Donald Trump won the American election. We've suddenly had, you know, the Americans granting the permission to use Atacams in Russia. We've seen the UK grant permission for storm shadows. We saw the news today that Bloomberg report, Dave Knight, that Britain's actually sent another batch of storm shadows. We don't know how many, but they've resupplied the Ukrainians with more of them. There are landmines coming. I mean, is this all too little too late in your view? Or does that stand a chance of changing this very difficult dynamic at the front that we described at the beginning of the podcast? Well,

of course, the situation is always complicated. From one hand, we're absolutely grateful to our partners for support, because without that support, Ukraine would be in an incredibly more difficult situation than now, to say at least. At the same time, we can go back to just the general theory of conflict and see it from that side. If the situation is like, you know, getting about to start the war, obviously, you would try to do whatever possible in order to de-escalate and in order to sort of avoid the war by all means. Because as we can see now, and we have seen that for, I have to remind, for 10 years, since 2014, the war is better to be avoided by all means possible. And Ukraine is not enjoying that for a moment, I mean, at all. I mean, so we do no price of peace, let's put it this way. But there are situations when negotiations or like a reasonable discussion is not helping. And these situations is that when things become existential. So in our case, this is when Russia clearly demonstrated that it's not interested in a peaceful resolution. It's interested in Ukraine losing its sovereignty and so on and so on. So then when the things became crucial in terms of like, we either win or die, there were points of time, and obviously the most obvious one is the beginning of the full-scale invasion, when these things became evident. So when Russia clearly demonstrated no need to any sort of civilized discussion, they just wanted to get rid of Ukraine from the map. So at those points of time, there is like a dilemma, which is still existent, unfortunately. And dilemma is, are you escalate a little bit by little bit, or you are trying to win? And unfortunately, that dilemma never been answered properly by White House administration. At the same time, as we all know, the international support to Ukraine is being done through the Rammstein, so-called Rammstein format, where all countries have to follow one pattern. Obviously, the United States government has the key seat on that table. And so that's why there's many weapons being provided by other allies, including UK, after the United States decided that this is okay to provide them. Or permissions to strike to Russian territories, we could see in this case. So what I mean by escalate little by little or win straight away. Russia had certain capabilities deployed to their theater. And we clearly understood that in order to address those, we need some, again, long-range weapons and so on and so on. At the same time, the provision of weapons has been done in sort of batches, in stages. And after very significant discussions and sort of advocacy and negotiations and so on and so on. And usually, as soon as certain types of weapons were provided, they were provided in very small batches for various reasons. But let me remind you that like two and a half years ago, the first long-range weapons such as howitzers, which are now considered as normal and nothing quite ordinary in the front, they were provided in a quantity of seven for the whole 1,500 kilometer front. And then they started to be increased and so on and so on. So that all goes like step by step. And also what we could see is that provision of certain types of weapons, including Patriot missiles, for example, which are also quite common right now in Ukraine, they've been provided after some serious escalations of the war. So they were provided as a response to the certain actions Russia did, either destruction of civilian buildings or some serious harm or any other types of escalation, conventional escalation. So essentially, this is a game of response to response and then response to response and so on. So right now, the permission to strike to Russian territory has been granted as a response to Russia bringing Korean troops, northern Korean troops. And as a response to that response, Russia made all this information campaign about striking with the new type of weapon and so on and so on. And information element was a huge part of it, if not bigger than the actual kinetic. So basically, we are playing the escalation game. This escalation game, and it's called escalation ladder in a war theory. So basically, it's like you're constantly stepping up. This is extremely dangerous game. And this is a game which may have no resolution, because Russia then will have to do something, and then we'll have to do something, and so on, and so on. And this thing may never stop, because it's essentially like a well-known chicken game in the game theory, you know, played on a kind of like a huge war level. The other option was to develop a campaign plan which would do a resolved blow to Russia militarily on the field, that they can start losing operations and they can realize that they're not going to win and they need to cut losses and they need to understand that something is going to happen very bad unless they stop. But that decision has never been taken. And the latest attempt was by President Zelensky to bring that victory plan, which contained some elements of that other option. And unfortunately, as we can see, it's been discussed still, but the current administration is yet to stay for a month or so. So basically, I don't think it's going to be any decision made on that. So we are in a sort of war setting, which is very, very dangerous. And that's why many people looking actually up to President Trump, thinking that, well, if he can change this course of game, maybe that's actually even better. But of course, the risk is that nobody knows, nobody has any idea how he's planning to do that. And that's a huge risk on himself. Thank

you for that, Andrei. On this topic of Western support, I know Danny's got a follow up question. Danny, go ahead.

Thank you. I was interested to know if there was concern in Ukraine that British stockpiles of storm shadow might be running low. Do you get any sense of how long the UK can continue sending this equipment out to Ukraine? Unfortunately,

the answer is never straightforward, the question is how long always depends what we use it for. Because if we want to win the whole war with the long-range missiles, just using them as a sort of magic weapon, that's not going to happen, and there's always going to be a shortage. approved campaign plan between the partners. Let's call it like, let's say, Rammstein Coalition. We have allies, right? And let's say that we don't have the approved campaign plan. Then we are in the war strategy, which is called War of Attrition, which means that we're trying to exhaust Russians by destroying their objects, like high-value targets, and then just waiting until they run out of resources. That war is very, very, very also dangerous because we don't know how resilient Russians are. And as we could see, they have a substantial resilience to losses, because 700,000 losses, nobody would think three years ago that would be not a showstopper for Russia. Well, everybody would think it would be, but it's not. And so on and so on. So clearly, this war is existential for Putin, and clearly, he doesn't want to stop. So war of attrition, perhaps, is not the wiser strategy. And any single general who you speak to, they will probably confirm you that, you know, we shouldn't be, should be really counting on that strategy. Alternative, again, would be campaign plan, like a resolve campaign plan, in which those weapons would be part of a larger portfolio and they would play a certain role. And then I don't think there would be a shortage of them. So the answer, in order to not to create a shortage of weapons, the weapons should be a part the ambitious campaign plan, where they are part of the combined arm portfolio. And then it would be a totally different situation. And I believe we're still on the process of approving that.

Thank you. So no single weapon can win this war.

Oh, absolutely. And there's no magic weapon at all. I mean, even if we're talking about aviation or anything, it all should work in a concerted manner, combines an operation approach and very, very robust campaign plan with a clear objective operational goals. Only then you can evaluate like how enough there is

something. Joe, I think you had another question as well.

Yeah, Andre, fascinating stuff. Thank you for joining us. I just wanted to address the issue of manpower with you. Last week, Ruse's Jaguatlin wrote Ukraine is rapidly approaching a point, but if it does not address the manpower issue, then it will struggle to defend the front, and so the collapse in its fighting positions will accelerate. I was in the US ahead of the US elections, and people I spoke to in Washington would argue that neither President Trump or Paris, whoever won the election, would be able to fix Ukraine's number one issue, and they listed that as manpower. I wanted to get your take on what Ukraine is doing to address the issue of manpower. I guess you can label it as a criticism from some of the Western analysts I've been speaking to. They say that Ukraine is looking to build 14 new brigades with new recruits rather than using new recruits to essentially fill in and replace the losses being suffered on the front lines. So yeah, I'd be really interested in your take on that, please, Andrew.

Well, there is always a debate here about whether we should complete new brigades or whether we should just replenish the previous ones. And there are pros and cons in each of these sides, and it's up to the military command to decide. And this is, again, this is basically an equation with lots of the elements, because you need to take care about the infrastructure support, you need to take care about the command, which brigades are better run, whether they have fresh forces, and so on and so on. So it's not a simple answer. And most likely, it's going to be different brigades will have different futures. So some of them would be kind of reduced, and some of them would be enlarged, and then the new ones would replace the ones which reduced. Bigger issue, though, is that whether Ukraine generally has enough people to sustain that fight. Again, there are two approaches to this. I cannot stress enough how strong our opinion is about the approach, which we have. The thing is that if we extrapolate the existing reality into the future, no country would be able to sustain that fight because that fight is too infantry focused and it's too focused on land and it's too focused on a shallow zone of like near the front line. So it's basically like you have a two armies clashing on the front in a sort of 19th, 18th century, World War II century sort of style. It's literally grinding the force, constantly creating the casualties. And that's basically a Russian playbook, very clear, because they don't mind. They, at least for the nearby future, they don't mind losing another 100,000. So for them, it seems like not a big deal, particularly these 100,000, maybe Koreans, North Koreans. So essentially, right now, we see some videos coming from the front, we see some information from our soldiers. Russians are literally, they don't care about the people at all. So they send them, they lose them. In some areas of the assaults, the rate of loss is like 90%, and they're fine about this. So basically, if we rephrase your question to a question like, how long we're able to sustain that fight, that type of a fight? And of course, then the question would be like, do we really want to sustain that type of a fight? Or maybe we should pay some attention to change the modality of this game, change the modality of the of the operational setting and i believe that you know just extrapolating the existing situation and saying okay so how long is it a year is that two years it's a wrong question because yes for some period of time mathematically as russi was was also about, mathematically, Ukraine still have population. But then there were, like, discussion about, like, oh, why don't Ukraine mobilize as 18-year Oh, there's one general from one of the European countries that suggests that why Ukraine doesn't mobilize women. All these discussions are completely missing the point that, you know, we could have a different war. United States government is complaining about, you know, providing too much money for Ukraine. Well, at least upcoming government, let's put it this way. And they're talking about hundreds of millions and so on and so on. Despite of all these hundreds of millions, Ukraine still doesn't have a single competitive aircraft which can keep Russian aviation away from the front. And establishing air superiority, or at least denying adversaries air superiority, is absolutely key provision for any warfighting concept. And still, Ukraine cannot establish this because there is, despite even of the F-16s provided, they are not competitive against Russian aviation. So what happens right now is that Ukrainian infantry buying time until the coalition figures

out a better way to set a better operational setting.