Podcast: Assessing Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine

Listen in as executive editor Jen Dimascio, defense editor Steve Trimble, London bureau chief Tony Osborne and senior aerospace industry analyst Craig Caffrey have a discussion about the opening days of Russia’s war on its neighbor Ukraine and how that renewed Europe’s focus on defending the continent.

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Rush Transcript

Jen DiMascio:

Hello, and welcome to the Check 6 podcast since Russia's February 24th first strikes all over Ukraine. Aviation Week's team of defense reporters has been on duty. They've been following developments about the war, how Russian air and missile forces executed the strikes, but also the extraordinary way in which this naked display of aggression from Russia against its neighbor has had the, had, had a real effect on the defense posture of Europe. With us today, we have defense editor, Steve Trimble, London Bureau chief, Tony Osborne, and senior analyst Craig Caffrey. I'm Jen DiMascio, executive editor for defense and space. I'd like to turn first to Steve Trimble to give us an overview of the situation.

Steve Trimble:

Thank you. Yeah, it's been quite an intense five or six days now. I should say just starting off that, I mean, it's tough to write about this and to be watching this and following this. I'm aware of all of the civilian casualties, all of the military casualties. I know this is, we're just at the beginning of something here. So, we're going to be talking about hardware. We're going to be talking about operations in a cold way, but we are aware of human loss and suffering involved.

Steve Trimble:

So, we are talking at the moment at, what is it? 10:20 AM on the U.S. East Coast, on March 1st. I say that just because the situation has been very dynamic. So it's important to timestamp where we stand before I start talking about where things are in the operational picture. I should also mention that the fog of war still lives especially in this age of open-source intelligence and widespread information warfare campaigns. It's sometimes a little bit difficult to completely validate fact and fiction.

Steve Trimble:

As far as we can understand things, from a multitude of sources, including U.S. DOD intelligence assessments, British military intelligence assessments, open-source intelligence information, the situation stands as clearly Ukraine still survives as a government, as a military. That in itself is impressive to a point, given the numerical disadvantage, and in some cases technical disadvantage at least on paper with the Russian military.

Steve Trimble:

However, that said, the overall operational picture in Ukraine, or for Ukraine is somewhat bleak or dire. You look at the operations by the Russian military, especially in the south and the southeast of the country, moving up from the Crimea Peninsula into the south eastern corner of Ukraine. They have almost completed the land bridge with the Donbas region. Mariupol is still holding out, but it's being encircled, and it looks like an offensive is underway at the moment by Russia to capture that city and complete that land bridge to the Crimean Peninsula. Then as you head west, Russian military is now continuing, but starting a new attack on Kherson, which is just across the Dnieper River on the southern tier of the country, which would give Russia a firm presence on that side of the river if that city falls.

Steve Trimble:

You see residents in Odessa, just southwest of there, along the coast of the Sea of Azov also preparing, or I should say, the Black Sea, also preparing for a Russian assault on that city. Though it doesn't appear especially imminent, at least as of this moment. As you go further north into the northwest area, there is the attack on Kharkiv, where ... I mean, it's almost amazing that city is still, and probably Ukraine's biggest success so far is managing to hold on to that city so close to the Russian border. But it's being encircled and being attacked ferociously with artillery and missile strikes.

Steve Trimble:

The question is how much longer that can hold? Then of course there's what could be considered the main action on Kyiv, the capital. You've got two axes of attack so far. From the northeast and northwest. It does appear perhaps the Russians will try to encircle the city to create a siege. So far, the city is in Ukrainian hands and holding. That's where things stand today. This war kicked off around 4:30 am local time in Kyiv on February 24th, with an opening barrage of about 160 missiles, both cruise missiles and ballistic missiles.

Steve Trimble:

DOD confirmed particularly that the ship launched cruise missiles were involved in the opening. Salvo, you can expect other air launch missiles fired by long range aviation command, bombers, including Kh-101s, Kh-555s also were involved in that first strike. A number of ballistic missiles have been identified, including Tochka. It's not clear if Iskander ballistic missiles were involved in that opening salvo, but they certainly have in subsequent days.

Steve Trimble:

That opening salvo just in those first few minutes of the war accounted for about 42% of all the missiles fired by Russia through the afternoon of the 28th according to the defense department. So, that I think speaks to the somewhat surprising shortage of precision guided missile attacks relative to what we were expecting. I'm not trying to minimize the situation, but you would have expected a much broader and much more numerous opening salvo to hit all the targets that would have existed.

Steve Trimble:

There is something like 135 different just air defense sites throughout Ukraine according to some assessments I've seen. So, targeting all of those, plus the command and control centers, plus other targets of interests would have required just a larger number of missiles. But for some reason we didn't see that. Perhaps not surprisingly then, but in a way still very surprising, Ukrainian air defense still exists. Perhaps even Ukrainian air force aviation to some level exists, although, we haven't seen much evidence of that in the last couple of days. But according to British intelligence updates this morning, the Russian aircraft still do not control the Ukrainian airspace.

Steve Trimble:

Given just widespread assessments of what Russia would want to do in the first few days of the war, it's just a very surprising thing that that still exists, Ukrainian air defense capability at all. Correspondingly perhaps, it does seem that Russian air force activity has been fairly limited, compared to, I would say my initial expectations and several other analysts. Long range aviation command in particular, which is the fleet of Tu-160 and Tu-95 bombers have been noticeably absent since perhaps that first day. There hasn't been a lot of talk I've seen anywhere of further strikes by air launch cruise missiles, or certainly drops of mass precision guided munitions by those types of aircraft over military or civilian targets.

Steve Trimble:

I see a lot of artillery strikes on civilian targets, but not airdrops. The consensus so far for western analysts is that the Russian war plan, their initial plan did not achieve its initial goals, which appeared to have been a very rapid seizure of the Ukrainian government, and the head of the Ukrainian government, sort of rolling over Ukrainian forces in the eastern part of the country, and that did not happen. So, we're seeing over the last couple of days, especially according to British military intelligence assessments, and U.S. DOD assessments, a shift to plan B, which seems to involve much more lethal attacks, much less discriminate attacks that have either accidentally, or intentionally targeted civilian areas, especially in places like Kharkiv, … and even Kyiv. Still not clear if long range aviation command is engaged at this point.

Steve Trimble:

If you go back to Syria and even Chechnya, you saw quite an extensive of long range aviation command assets in both of those conflicts. There was a Tu-22M3, for example. I mean, those planes did deploy in each of those cases, and were used extensively with unguided munitions. We haven't seen that yet. Perhaps the possible theory is that Russia has learned some lessons from the Georgia war in 2008, where Ukrainian air defense systems acquired by Georgia, perhaps even manned by Ukrainian crews, were pretty effective against Russian aircraft, including downing a Tu-22M3 three that appeared to be operating as a surveillance aircraft at the time that was shot down.

Steve Trimble:

So, the lesson so far in the operational side is that the precision guided munition stockpiles are very important in modern war, and keeping those topped up to the maximum extent possible is a very pretty useful thing if you're planning to invade another country. It doesn't appear that Russia has theirs topped up, and there hasn't been any their use of those so far in this conflict, even despite what we've seen.

Steve Trimble:

The survival of the Ukrainian air and missile defense also highlights I think the challenge of establishing air superiority in a modern age with mobile targets. It's not clear yet if that's really a crossover issue for NATO, or if there's some flaw or gap in Russian capabilities that's allowing that to happen.

Steve Trimble:

Finally, the big thing I'm still scratching my head over is, so far, the strikingly quiet posture of electronic warfare, space and cyber domains in this conflict, which was something we thought we'd see a lot more of, it has to be said that these are domains that tend to be quiet even when they're quite active. So, even when you see a kinetic strike that is enabled by something in those domains, traceability, especially to a third party observer is really quite difficult. So, that's part of it. But even so, it does seem like these domains are much quieter than what was expected.

Steve Trimble:

So, we'll see how the after action assessments, and hopefully those will come as soon as possible, because I mean, the war would be over, but it would be interesting to see what comes out of those types of assessments. That's the update on the operational picture. I'll hand it back to Jen.

Jen DiMascio:

Thanks, Steve. With all that's happened we've really seen an extraordinary display of unity within Europe. Tony, I'm wondering if you can describe the situation. What's unfolded in the past week? And why does it matter?

Tony Osborne:

Thanks, Jen. I think looking back at the past few days. I think Steve summed up really well. The shock of what has happened has truly galvanized Europe. After years of rifts between them, we had Trump having a go at the NATO system of, Macron calling it brain dead. And all of a sudden, everyone is on the same footing. They're, they're watching in pure anger. I think that Putin and his ministers actively lied to the world in saying that they wouldn't invade. That was said to the face of the likes of German chancellor Olaf Scholz and French president, Macron.

Tony Osborne:

So in the last few days we've seen Berlin and what was essentially a special relationship it had with Russia, over the course of a 29 minute speech by Olaf Scholz in the German parliament on Sunday, he rewrote the nation's foreign policy. He has set the country on the course to become one of the world's biggest defense spenders, a hundred billion dollar fund to transform the country's armed forces. More on that in a few moments.

Tony Osborne:

We've seen Finland and Sweden, both in military, unaligned for decades are now considering accession to NATO. Finnish parliament was actually discussing that today, and the public opinion polls suggest that the Finnish public are in the favor of it. We've seen Switzerland breaking its long held neutrality and imposing financial sanctions. Then we've got the European Union, which obviously in recent years has taken more interest in defense matters is actually supplying weapons in conjunction with its members, and providing lethal aid to Ukraine. Of course, there was talk about providing fighter jets. That doesn't seem to be coming off smoothly as they hoped, but we're talking about missiles, ammunition, guns, all things that are being requested by president Zelensky and his team in Kyiv. These are on top of the individual contributions made by NATO countries.

Tony Osborne:

Going back to Germany, which is arguably the most significant change of all of this, there is a hundred billion fund, which is likely to fill many of the perceived gaps in its capability. FCAS will be a priority, probably with France. We're likely to see a tornado successor decision in the very near future. It was interesting that Chancellor Scholz did not mention the previous administration's choice of Boeing F-18 Super Hornet, but the A-35 is a likely contender now. We're also likely to see decisions on things like growing base air defense programs, like TLVS.

Tony Osborne:

So, a lot of these programs, a lot of these gaps, decisions on armed vehicles, armed formations, these are all going to be taken with a hundred billion dollar fund. Then the push to get to 2%, which if you remember in previous years, Germany had no intention of getting near that 2% of GDP that NATO had requested its members to go for in terms of spending. Germany hadn't expected to even get to 1.5% by 2025, 2030.

Tony Osborne:

So, 2% is a massive hike. I think Craig will probably allude to in a few moments, it's going to make the country one of the biggest spenders after the U.S. and China. So, yeah, I think NATO is galvanized, the European is galvanized. I think actually, defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, he said, "Mr. Putin does not want a strong NATO on his western flank." And that's exactly what he's getting.

Tony Osborne:

I think Putin really hoped that the various rifts that he's created, dark money, subterfusion of Europe's society and politics over the last decade would have perhaps created a rift, created fragments in how he would pursue a potential invasion of Ukraine, and how NATO and Europe would react, but I think the opposite has happened.

Jen DiMascio:

Craig, you've been following the spending of Europe for a long time, and even charting some growth in European defense spending, since Russian's invasion of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, but how do these recent events change that outlook?

Craig Caffrey:

Yeah. I mean, it changes it massively. Doesn't it? I mean, Tony has alluded to it already, but I think there's things happening in European defense and security policy now, but certainly before Christmas some would have said were completely impossible. And I think probably the best example of that is Germany's defense budget and what's happening there. I mean, they released ... I think they changed the whitepaper back in 2016, and everyone said they would get more robust about defense policy going forward.

Craig Caffrey:

That robust outlook was to look at moving towards 2% of GDP, when the economic situation allowed. But since then we've seen the defense budget move maybe from around 1.1% GDP, to about 1.3. They were looking at maybe drawing a bit of that back over the next few years. At least that's what the finance plan says.

Craig Caffrey:

This announcement on Sunday, which was actually huge, a hundred billion euros. $112 billion for investments and armor projects for the German forces. That's the big shot and boost. All that money is supposed to come in as a one off special budget within the 2022 budget. Then beyond that as well, they've also said that they want to commit 2% of GDP.

Craig Caffrey:

Essentially what I think this looks like, the details are not exactly clear at the moment, but this huge one time budget is not uncommon with defense budgets around the world. Taiwan did something similar recently, so has Kuwait recently. You approve a huge amount of money. You then pay that out over the short term to kind of fund big capital projects.

Craig Caffrey:

I think that's what gets Germany to 2% of GDP quite quickly. So, that hundred billion won't be able to be spent this year. It'll probably be spent over the next five years. And then in the background, we'll see the core defense budget. So, the annual defense budget that gets approved every year, gradually move up to 2% of GDP.

Craig Caffrey:

I think that'll be a longer term process if nothing, if no other reason than to get to 2% of GDP to boost defense spending by that much. I mean, to put that in context, we're looking at this year 2022, German defense, spending is around $58 billion. To get to 2% of GDP, they'll be close to $90 billion when they get there. So it's a huge increase. There's got to be big decisions there around posture, around force structure and everything else.

Craig Caffrey:

I think all those decisions will only follow once you get a big new defense whitepaper. It'll probably take a year or two to do that. So, I'd imagine sometime 2024 we'll get a new whitepaper. Probably at that point is when you'll see the big growth in the core budget. I think before that it'll all this, this kind of this shot and funding, but I mean, yes, it's absolutely huge. In a global context it's like Tony says, I mean, Germany currently sixth place in the lead table of global defense spend. This will move straight past France and the UK into third place with that $90 billion. So, well beyond what France and the UK spend. Like I said, I think the money will be spent on obviously procurement projects and Tony has gone through a lot of those there now.

Craig Caffrey:

I think that some other things that are short term, spare stocks, I think there's been availability issues with some of the German platforms. Some of that is down to not necessarily having enough spare stocks. I think you could get investments around that. You could potentially get new availability contracts as well, support-wise, maybe some investment in building up munition stocks as well and replenishing some of these consumables that have come out there.

Craig Caffrey:

There's a number of programs that'll probably do well out of it, FCAs is a good example of that. I think before Christmas people thought maybe FCAs was in trouble, certainly in terms of France and Germany and what the relationship was there and how that was going to move forward. But suddenly you've got Germany, that's awash with money, they've set a precedent for exporting arms to conflict zones.

Craig Caffrey:

I think it's an exceptional circumstance. I don't think this completely changes their arms exports view, but it shows that they are flexible under certain conditions. I think certainly Germany realizes that you can't just assume that everybody will be peaceful, and use diplomacy and economic statesmanship. There are countries out there like Russia that do use military force and only understand to some extent, hard power.

Craig Caffrey:

So, I think their reluctance to use offensive capabilities, or incorporate offensive capabilities into these platforms kind of goes away as well. I think that helps the program. I think, Tony again spoke about cooperation That's going to be huge over the next few years. I think suddenly maybe the bickering around industrial work share will to some extent be forced away by the politics of the situation.

Craig Caffrey:

I think a lot of the issues are still there for FCAS, but they've gone away a bit. I think it's good for the program. In the European context, it's absolutely huge. Germany could be the first money. We talk about Germany being the big thing, and it does make a massive difference to European spending. It could be the first money. We've been looking at scenarios of where European spending might go. I'll tell you that before Christmas, in fact, two weeks ago, we were looking at European defense projections that looked a bit of a post-COVID low, people looking at fiscal consolidation, defense growth slowing down after quite a good period, since 2014. Driven then even by … of Crimea by Russia. So, we were looking to spending from about $320 billion to around $340 billion by 2030. So, by 5% real terms of growth, and some potential for short term cuts in 2022, '23, '24.

Craig Caffrey:

Now we're looking at, we think we'll see growth certainly in excess of 30%, or around 30%. Maybe in excess of that. So, certainly spending getting to over 400 billion by 2030, which I just think is completely impossible for not least, because Germany is driving so much of their growth. If no one else increases spending over the next decade, everyone stays completely flat. We still get to 15% growth, just based on what's Germany's done. So yeah, absolutely huge for Europe. There are some implications for global security and everything as well, but I'll leave it there for now. We we can get into it more if we need to, but yeah, absolutely huge.

Jen DiMascio:

Yeah. Tony?

Tony Osborne:

I mean, I've spoken to a few people as a result of what's been happening, the perception is that not many nations will be able to afford what Germany is doing and certainly not on the scale, but certainly the expectation is that nations will have to make more investments. And one of those key investments at this point will probably be in munition stocks, where they've been allowed to progressively deteriorate over the last few years, especially since the Cold War and may have to reach a new normal. And of course the price of current precision guided munitions, particularly those air launch ones, it's going to make that a very expensive process, but that money is going to have to be spent because weapon stocks are now generally low, and countries just do not keep large stocks of weapons anymore. at might be one of the first big investments that we see from European nations going forward.

Tony Osborne:

I don't know whether we're going to see massive investments in combat aircraft or, but maybe perhaps ballistic, anti-ballistic missile systems and that sort of thing. The other big thing that we haven't talked about yet is perhaps what impact this has on things like Asia-Pacific pivots and stuff like that, which France and the UK have been eagerly talking about in their defense reviews in recent years. France has talked about, winning a war before fighting it.

Tony Osborne:

A lot of that is going to have to be radically looked at again. Obviously Germany will probably produce a whitepaper as Craig alluded to. And also NATO is producing a new document on its strategic thinking going forward. A lot of the stuff is going to have to be rewritten. Of course, there is also the issue that, is China and Russia going to become the new aggressor in this future world? We haven't really seen positive anti-invasion language coming out of Beijing from all of this, and several other nations have gone the same way. What are we facing next? And are we going to have to rewrite entire doctrines and strategies based on what occurred in the last week?

Jen DiMascio:

Yeah. I think that raises a lot of interesting questions, Tony. To just close this out, I wanted to narrow the discussion back into Russia a wee bit. What do you guys think the coming days hold for this? Obviously, as you just laid out, it's got huge implications for global security going forward, but just looking at the near term, and I know none of us have a crystal ball and that things have certainly developed in ways we couldn't have foreseen even a week ago, but what are you hearing? And what are you seeing? What could you say might happen in the next couple of days?

Steve Trimble:

I can chime in there. There is quite a bit of noise right now about how this expands beyond purely Russian, Ukrainian conflict, with perhaps NATO logistical support to Ukraine, to something much more dynamic than that, with NATO and [inaudible 00:27:44] no fly zone. That's been requested by Zelenskiy apparently, and entertained by certain even defense experts and security experts, but also just rejected flatly by the White House, and by Boris Johnson and by many other experts who note the type of escalation that that involves right on Russia's doorstep. I would also note in particular the practicalities of this type of operation.

Steve Trimble:

No fly zone over Kharkiv for example, is 20 miles or so away from the Russian border. It is probably 530 or so miles from the nearest NATO base in Romania. That is at the very end of the F-35's mission radius. If you assume that it would have to take a somewhat circuitous route to get there in the first place, it's beyond the radius of the F-22, for example. No refueling support would be available for it. So, there would have to be a constant aircraft coming in and out. Not to mention Russian air defense being all around there, you'd have to do initial cruise missile strikes deep into Russia to take out radars in Bella, Russia, just to make sure that they can actually get in.

Steve Trimble:

I mean, all this talk just seems wildly impractical. Unless there is real tolerance for the genuine risks that come with escalation to that level. That's one aspect of this. I do think ... I mean, Russia is going to have to lick its wounds after this. They've lost a lot of stuff. We don't know how much ... If you just browse through the OSINT pictures, there is a lot of armored vehicles, and tanks and other artillery that are just getting left behind or destroyed, even if some of those are not quite genuine, or not validated at least. It's clear that there are some heavy losses. So, it could be a while before Russia is able to re-mobilize again, especially given the sanctions and the other economic pressures that are being applied on them right now.

Steve Trimble:

So, we all have to take a look back, hopefully when this ends, and hopefully that will be very soon. My worry is that this is just going to keep going and become more of a siege, and much more of a brutal type of military operation that goes on for a long time. I hope it doesn't happen like that, but that's where it seems to be heading.

Jen DiMascio:

Tony?

Tony Osborne:

I agree totally with all Steve just said. Maybe perhaps looking a little bit back at history, Russia doesn't do invasions very well. Certainly, the humiliation of Afghanistan was one of the things that led to the end of the Cold War. When this does come to an end, if it comes to an end quickly, if it comes to an end in a while, significant changes will be afoot.

Tony Osborne:

The other thing to remember is that, there may not be an appetite for this for much longer as well, amongst Putin's minister's, Putin's government, or even Putin's military. Maybe that's something else we need to hope for as well, that maybe, maybe senior generals won't have the appetite to keep this up. Cold War era of Soviet Union, perhaps where, where casualties were, particularly those in Afghanistan were not ... The cost of human life was not as heavily regarded. There are mothers and fathers back in Russia who want to see their kids come home alive. We're not really clear on how much of the information that is coming out of Ukraine is being fed back into Russia at the moment. So, there's a few other issues there too as well.

Jen DiMascio:

Great. Steve?

Craig Caffrey:

I think, trying my best not to think too much about the conflict itself, because I agree with Steve and Tony that I think it seems to be taking a bad turn. I mean, speaking to what I know and defense spending. I think going back very short term to the German question, obviously they're going to try and get the $112 billion special project passed into law. I think there was talk in the speech on Sunday by Olaf Scholz about signing the 2% of GDP into the constitution, which would be a very big deal. I'd imagine that needs to be, if it's going to happen, it's certainly going to happen if it happens in the short term. I don't think when things are looking this bad, because that's a big commitment. Not many countries commit in the constitution by law to do 2% of GDP on defense.

Craig Caffrey:

I think beyond that, I think the same process will be going on in capitals throughout Europe. There was a danger that ... Some of the long term spending plans that came in after the annexation of Crimea were losing steam in some places. I think this reinvigorates those. I think you'll see plans boosted, I think you'll see plans accelerated. I think you'll see cuts go away.

Craig Caffrey:

I think most countries will be looking at that posture now, figuring out what they actually need to do to to actually deter Russia. Rather than just spending a lot on defense, what military capability does this actually produce? Because I think that's maybe the main [inaudible 00:33:48] against Europe is that maybe aside from a handful of countries in Europe, regardless of what they're actually spending on Europe, how much military capabilities is it actually generating? Or is it mostly about industrial programs and modernization, almost for the sake of modernization? I think that's where the reassessments are going to be. So, a horrific time, but fascinating for European defense and security sector.

Jen DiMascio:

Well, unfortunately that's all we have time for. So join us again next week for another edition of the Check 6 podcast. You can subscribe to Check 6 in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon, Audible and Spotify. Join us again next week and stay safe.