Let's talk about what is happening in Ukraine right now. We have these press briefings on Fridays here in Estonia and they have talked about how the initiative is with the Russians obviously because of the lack of ammunition. Recently, just yesterday if I am not mistaken, Zelenskyy said that for the first time in a while nobody was reporting a shortage of ammunition. But then again you have these developments on the Kharkiv front. Who holds the initiative right now, what is happening?

The initiative is clearly with the Russians. Of course, Ukraine's situation in logistics, especially ammunition has improved as the first American batches have crossed the border and are now available. I don't think it was a particularly wise decision from Zelenskyy to say that nobody has complained about the shortage. Because [while] the availability of ammunition has improved, it does not mean everything is perfect. It kind of leaves the impression that the president is fed the news he wants to hear, not the news he should hear.

If you look at the Russian armed forces, they have, by consecutive waves of increasing their personnel and especially volunteers, increased their armed forces in Ukraine. Their total armed forces are larger still, of course, but they now have over 420,000 personnel, roughly 3,400 MBTs, roughly 5,000 armored vehicles of all sorts in Ukraine alone. That is not a small force. We should keep in mind that it would be extremely challenging for any army, even in the West to erode such a large force. Just the sheer quantity of it.

Of course, we also have the problem that the Ukrainian side has not been able to recoup its losses even one for one. For every destroyed vehicle, they have not gotten an exact replacement. The loss of skilled personnel who had experience from the Donbas is felt in the armed forces. They need another wave of mobilization, which they are conducting now. It takes time for people to be trained, integrated properly into the brigades they are sent to. These are all issues for the Ukrainian armed forces, and although they are being addressed, addressing them takes time. The Russians seized the opportunity to preempt any kind of force reconstruction on the Ukrainian side, to try to push as hard and as brutal as they can in order to erode the Ukrainian armed forces. That is a difficult situation. Unfortunately, it will remain difficult during the summer and then we will see when autumn comes where we will go.

U.S. aid also included long-range ATACMS missiles. The Danes and Dutch have pledged to send fighter planes. As concerns the American missiles, we can see the Ukrainians using them against Russian targets in Crimea. Could these planes and missiles bring change, or are too few still being sent over?

It will not shift the initiative over to the Ukrainian side. The quantity is too low. With F-16s we are talkin about a handful of aircraft. Ukraine needs roughly 80 fighters to just keep up with their defensive counter-air tasks. It's a huge country, it's a long-long front line. Ukraine is short on surface-to-air missiles not only around the cities but also on the front line, which increased the freedom of maneuver for Russian UAVs, like Orlans, to reconnoiter targets, positions and Ukrainian rear logistics etc. It is extremely problematic.

There are only fighters in the West we can give them, but otherwise, we don't have enough surface-to-air missile batteries in the West. Our forces are organized in a very different way and based on air superiority for a lot of counter-air tasks. Unfortunately, this F-16s debate has been delayed, it took six months to talk the Americans into delivering them. Now we are only talking about several European F-16s. Even though the Americans have a reserve stockpile of these planes, there are none committed to the war in Ukraine. That is extremely disappointing.

The ATACMS is very effective. [It is] also noteworthy that we are talking about ATACMS with cluster munition warheads. They are effective because they don't rely on GPS guidance to strike targets. They are extremely effective against air bases, helicopter bases, Russian air defense missiles, against electronic warfare assets, these kinds of high value targets. However, there are two caveats.

The first is that unitary warhead ATACMS, which would be suitable for destroying bridges, railway installations etc. to disturb Russian logistics or concrete command bunkers, are guided by GPS. Ample Russian electronic warfare systems mean these would not yield too many results.

The second thing is that the missiles can be successfully used on the southern front. Because here close air support and rotary wing aviation support for the southern front comes from Crimea and that is, of course, occupied Ukrainian territory and you can strike it. But if you look at the Donbas front, the respective airbases where the Russians fly from are near Rostov on Don. If we look at the Kharkiv front, they are near Belgorod and Voronez, and there the Ukrainians are not allowed to strike. Of course, they [the Russians] fly the same glide bomb sorties, close air support etc. there. That is something we urgently need to rethink.

We see it from the effectiveness of Russian operations. The closer they operate to their own borders, sanctuary, the more effective the Russians are. There is a clear connotation of this and we need to address this. Any military target on Russian soil is a legitimate military target according to the UN charter and international law of war. Nobody asked Russia to start this war. If you start a war of aggression, you should live and face the consequences. That entails the defending party shooting at your territory.

A lot of hopes are placed on F-16 fighter jets in the media. At the same time, talking to experts, I'm told that the aircraft are difficult to fly in areas of dense air defenses and against the kinds of planes the Russians have. Ukrainian fighters need to fly low in order to avoid danger. This also means that their air-to-air missiles have to pass through denser air and, therefore, have a shorter range. I get the impression that people think Ukraine can use these planes the way the West would. Is that the case? What should we give the Ukrainians so they could do more? More planes and various aircraft weaponry?

We are talking about weapons, we are talking about quantity, but we are also talking about a lot of force enablers in the West. Airborne early warning and control stations to guide in fighters that provide them with over-the-horizon full situational awareness. All the electronic reconnaissance assets, from satellites to airborne assets, that warn Western planes about surface-to-air missiles on the Russian side. All of it is lacking in Ukraine. They will use F-16 A/B models that are capable aircraft, but were used in the West predominately for air policing and in very limited air-to-ground strike roles. It's radar is still a mechanically tilted radar, it has better jammers than a very old MiG-29, but they are still not the most modern jet jammers you can find in the West.

They will face Russian aircraft that can fly at high altitude and fire air-to-air missiles that have a range of over 200 km. They have hit Ukrainian aircraft up to 260 km inside of Ukrainian territory. They have to fly in low to mask themselves and can only pull up before striking.

There is, of course, the advantage that the AMRAAM missile they are probably going to use is an active fire-and-forget missile. So you don't need to lock on the target and continuously illuminate the target you want to intercept, like you do with Soviet R27 missiles. That is a big tactical advantage. They can be sneakier and ensure better survivability for themselves.

Hopefully, they'll also get more ammunition than we can give them for the MiG-29 or Su-27. It is simply difficult to find Soviet aircraft armament in the West. They will do what they did with their old Soviet planes, just in a more efficient and sustainable way. Logistically, it should be better or easier for us to keep them in the fight.

That said, just because it is a Western type fighter doesn't mean Ukraine can be given all the combat enablers that allow, for example, the U.S. Air Force or the IAF to completely punish and wipe out enemy air forces like in Syria or in Iraq. That the Ukrainians will be flying F-16s does not mean they can do the same.

If we consider to what extent the West relies on its air forces, it remains unclear why keep Ukraine cut off from the West's core military capabilities – aerial ones. It seems peculiar. That said, matters of training, interoperability etc. needed by such aerial warfare need to be considered. We could give Ukraine planes, but can we give them the experience and skills of Western air forces? Is it even possible to turn the Ukrainian Air Force into a Western one?

I think it will take a long time. But in certain aspects it has already happened. The Ukrainians for now are using, for example, the Storm Shadow and SCALP EG and they are also using French guided bombs. To make effective use of these French guided bombs, the French have invested in training Ukrainian forward air controllers, training especially the pilots in the procedure of launching them and coordinating with ground forces on how to do so. If you look at the hit rate of these weapons, it is much higher in terms of destroyed targets than, for example, HIMARS. It is a testament to the fact that the French have properly thought through these weapons deliveries, including all the training procedure aspects of these glide bombs.

Of course, there are not so many of them, they are not used in huge quantities because it is a limited supply, but it shows that if you think things through properly and conduct the necessary training and preparation of personnel, prepare the organization to handle things – it is quite possible.

While we're on the subject of learning and ingenuity on the battlefield, the Ukrainians have come up with DIY solutions for using Western weapons on Soviet fighters. They've used tablets in fighter cockpits. We've also seen the Ukrainians weld old Russian air-to-air missiles to naval drones or using air defense solutions dubbed FrankenSAMs. But we're also seeing so-called turtle tanks on the Russian side. What kinds of ad hoc systems are both sides using, and which among them are noteworthy?

An open data analyst's rendering of a Ukrainian naval drone carrying old air-to-air missiles. Russian propaganda has also disseminated videos of such drones and claims to have destroyed at least one.

***UPDATE***
Here-> https://t.co/mKwQP8lkB7#Ukraine deploys 'FrankenSAM' air defenses on maritime drones (USVs). The first known example was neutralized

If however they prove effective against helicopters, then they could force #Russia to rethink its defenses. #OSINT pic.twitter.com/JztSBWSxVT

— H I Sutton (@CovertShores) May 6, 2024

A Ukrainian Air Force video depicting an ordinary tablet computer complementing a fighter's cockpit.

Ukrainian Air Force Su-27 Flanker Wild Weasel operations, seen here conducting multiple low level standoff strikes against Russian radars with US-supplied AGM-88 HARMs. pic.twitter.com/7CosjXFNkO

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) April 21, 2024

Image from Russian propaganda channels of a turtle tank.

Russian T-80U tank, now a turtle tank. pic.twitter.com/sbeLwPYNpJ

— Clash Report (@clashreport) May 13, 2024

I think the so-called turtle tanks are a noteworthy development, not for the turtle armor, but they're basically mobile heavily armored jamming stations that accompany other fighting vehicles to complete their tasks. The Russians are experimenting with using them and combining them with other forces. I don't think they have yet found the perfect recipe because you see them using them in slightly different ways all the time. So they are clearly at an experimental stage, but armored mobile jamming stations to accompany mechanized forces is a thing that will stay. There might be more effective ones, no longer makeshift but properly designed ones that will very likely look different than turtle tanks, but they are here to stay.

The FrankenSAMs are something done out of necessity. But the problem with all this old semi-analogue stuff – using old AIM-7 and other missiles with Soviet launchers – is that there are limits to what you can do without completely rebuilding either the system or the missile. This old stuff is vulnerable to electronic warfare.

The whole electronic warfare spectrum is not fancy, it does not look cool, but there is enormous development in this field in the war. Both technically, in terms of what you build, and tactically or how do you use it, synchronize it with other forces and so on.

On the Ukrainian side, the interceptor drones are something we should keep an eye on, but we should also look into how the Ukrainians are reinventing combined arms warfare, systems integration. For example, equipping old tanks with screens to give them live drone footage. To really determine what the commander needs and at what levels in terms of reconnaissance, electronic warfare. What can be supplied with superior echelons. This is all refining and tinkering with how to synchronize different arms for a much greater role as of today. That is tactically, doctrinally something we should watch. This technology is not going to go away. There might be more advanced and efficient examples, but it is also where our intellectual journey starts [in terms of] how to use a lot of unmanned vehicles and systems.

These turtle tanks come off as one way the Russians are trying to combat FPV drones. Are they doing it because the Ukrainians do not have enough ammunition? Would these turtle tanks still be a threat against modern Javelin or Spike anti-tank missiles?

If you have a lot of spaced armor, it decreases the effectiveness of any HEAT (high explosive anti tank) warhead, but I don't think to the extent that it truly matters. Ukrainian tankers also lack proper APDS (armor piercing discarding sabot) rounds for their 125 mm tank guns. Usually they drive around with high explosive [rounds], but even if you land a 125 mm explosive round on such a turtle tank, I think it probably won't fulfill it's combat mission. I think there are lots of tactical ways around them using conventional weapon systems. Yes, if the Ukrainians had more ammunition for these conventional weapon systems, they would have an easier time defeating these turtle tanks. Nevertheless, we will see mobile Russian jamming systems moving forward.

What an FPV drone usually does is it immobilizes an armored vehicle. If you are not in a very thin-skinned vehicle, such as an MT-LB or BMP1 or some other kind of crap tin, it just immobilizes the vehicle and then it needs to be finished off by a conventional weapons system, either artillery or an anti tank missile.

But as such the FPV drones had more the tactical use of stopping and disturbing the Russian mechanized assault because so many vehicles are then bogged down and can't continue driving into their firing positions or their assault positions. The concept of the mechanized assault fails. We have seen that over and over and over and over. Even if FPV drones lack lethality, it has proven to be of tremendous value for the Ukrainians just to deny the Russians proper breakthroughs. Even if they breach the Ukrainian lines, they cannot exploit it because they cannot bring enough vehicles in a short time to reach the Ukrainians' flank.

So FPV drones, regardless of how cheap and unsophisticated they might look on the outside, will continue to be valuable. They are cheap like ammunition, used in their thousands, and it doesn't matter because they are so cheap. They will be used by any party that will enter a longer war just because it is a simple augmentation of your firepower. The drone operator doesn't need direct line of fire with the enemy so it is very hard to anticipate where the drone operators are. You can direct fire across a very long range. Not in depth because of the electronic warfare systems, but at least sort of left and right of the frontline. It helps to decentralize forces, cover a long front with fewer forces, which is something if you have so many casualties, if you have problems with recruiting sufficient personnel. So the drones are here to stay even if the Ukrainians will ideally and hopefully get more ammunition and systems from the West to cope with some of their deficiencies.

We can see those turtle tanks in images. They look curious and get a lot of attention for that reason. What else have the Russians learned, which is perhaps less visible? For example, how quickly they can find and hit targets using indirect fire. These kill chains.

The shortening of the kill chain. It started with artillery. It was sometimes really striking at the begging of the invasion that a lot of artillery observers on the Russian side didn't even have training on the Strelec system to call in fast artillery fire. Which is mind-boggling. They quickly learned that they really have to make use of all the stuff they have. It started with artillery fire and was followed up by calling in glide bombs, air support in a significantly shorter time. Now we see the same with long range missiles, such as Iskanders and against civilian targets also. How they immediately call in the Iranian Shahed drones when they discover a reserve power station. Here the Russians have adapted.

They also deconflict their electronic warfare systems with their own signaling devices. At the very begging their electronic warfare troops significantly underperformed because they jammed their own voice radio and Russian troops couldn't communicate. The first way to solve this problem, and this is more suitable in a static war, is to dig a lot of underground lines and return to using static telephones. But they also managed to deconflict when they are mobile.

Although we're still talking about a lot of the systems that were known before the war, they now make very effective use of them. This has led to the battlefield being a GPS-denied environment. In some parts it is not a complete comms-denied environment, but it's a very difficult environment for communication. That is posing challenges for the Ukrainians. Especially as Ukrainians rely on commercial radio sets, encrypted but still commercial, and they rely on commercial signaling equipment to guide their drones.

On the Russian side, I think they have actually rediscovered infantry tactics from the Second world War, with newer integrations and flavors. This is also an adaptation to the constraints the Russian army has in terms of junior officers and force quality. Only a few units that they have are still capable of properly assaulting, and so you need to make the most efficient use of this kind of waste infantry to prepare ground, sometimes even to just physically dig trenches all the way to the target of the assault. Protect your elite infantry that you need to preserve.

During the panel Friday, it was suggested that the emphasis has moved away from maneuver units to sheer firepower. While it was in military jargon and I may be off here, it almost sounded like a thought from the previous century. Was maneuver warfare a fad and are we now back to reality where wars are fought with a lot of firepower, slowly trying to conquer key positions on the battlefield?

That depends on where you look at it. There are different traditions for how to conduct battles and war. Here I have too much German influence to say that maneuver warfare is dead, because maneuver warfare was at least for the German army, but also for the Austrian army, the predominant way of fighting. With a few exceptions, like WWI. The Napoleonic Wars were predominately maneuver, even though you also had static battles. The British fought differently in Spain and at Waterloo. We also fought the French in mobile battles and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Then of course Königgrätz etc., the campaigns against the Italians in the 19th century, and then the Second World War was by and large maneuver warfare. It had its static phases but was still largely maneuver warfare.

The thing today is that technical progress, like in the First World War, has led to a superiority of fire so the war is largely static. Like in the 1920s, there are some who say that this means maneuver warfare is dead and it will never revive again, like the French said in the interwar period. Then there are others who, like Hans von Seeckt and Heinz Guderian did, say that we don't actually have any other option than to reinvent maneuver warfare. This is also true on the Ukrainian side. The Russians can much easier afford to fight a rather static firepower war. They have the upper hand in numbers. If you are inferior in terms of mass but aim for strategic results and kicking the Russians out of your country, you don't want to just hold the line as long as you can and wait for Minsk 3 to settle things. It's not what the Ukrainians really want. That's what the West wants, but the Ukrainians don't.

You have to compel the Russians out and you have to compel them into a situation that rests less on the superiority of materiel, which we won't achieve, but rather maneuvering them into a situation where their position becomes useless. The problem is how to achieve this. Again we are seeing a lot of technology that augments firepower in infancy but we have no idea how to use and synchronize it to organize movement.

On the German side, the system integration thing was Guderian. Because he knew that voice radio would be the thing that synchronizes artillery and mechanized infantry and air power. They tried it out in Spain and later on they knew what to do. It's similar with the Ukrainians, they also experimented with how to synchronize electronic warfare, drones. Of course, they have a long list of drone and anti-drone warfare capabilities that they still have to develop.

I think that on a strategic level it is crucially important for the European Union to support the Ukrainian defense sector. Not just because it is cheaper to produce a lot of things in Ukraine, but to enable the Ukrainians to master the learning curve and to apply the lessons learned at scale. That is something only they can do and develop for themselves. Because they are on the front and experimenting with this stuff. It is not something you can do in Europe, enterprises that are far away from the front and have no feedback from the armed forces. Let's see whether in this war we will return to maneuver warfare or not. It is something that might work or might not work. We might discover that some of the ideas that the Ukrainians have don't work out. Like a lot of ideas about how to use tanks in the interwar period didn't work out. Sometimes the technology was not mature enough, sometimes the tactics were wrong. In the end, [we need] to give Ukraine the chance to achieve victory, not just mere survival but real victory. In order to drive home the point in Moscow that this nonsense should never have started and should never start again, they need to maneuver.

How to get there? The Estonian Ministry of Defense has said that if everyone backing Ukraine would spend 0.25 percent of GDP on aid, it would be possible to wear Russia out. Is that realistic? It seems to me that it is a mere realization that the West has more power than Russia, while there is no real plan for using that power. If we ask the politicians about it, they say that a victory is up to the Ukrainians to define. Isn't it just a case of bewilderment if we fail to propose a solution?

We have to think about it. The problem here is that a lot of countries in the West, and they would violently deny this, but I say so anyway – that the Americans and the Germans who are the two biggest donators of military aid are not really convinced about victory. They don't spell it out. Politicians on the American or German side, like the German defense minister (Boris Pistorius) or Anthony Blinken or Lloyd Austin, who in the very early phases of the war spelled out the idea of victory have been called back on their rhetoric because the big boss does not want it.

If you are playing only for Minsk 3 and for a stalemate then you don't want maneuver warfare. You just want to basically hold the line and provide them enough so that they can fulfill this defensive task. I have a big problem seeing any end to the war. Not to mention Ukraine winning, I don't think this will enable Ukraine to even achieve a ceasefire because the Russians want a final solution, they literally call it a final solution to the Ukraine question. There is no ceasefire, no relative stuff in the Russians' plans. They see the conquest of Ukraine as their essential precondition for re-establishing Russia as a great power on the European continent. Dominating the European continent. That is where they want to go. They can't let 80 percent of Ukraine be somewhere else. It is a stumbling block on that road.

The other problem is the Russians have much less of a problem to sustain such a war of attrition. Their defense industrial complex has geared up. They have large Soviet stocks, we don't have large Soviet stocks. We only produce ammunition en masse. We don't produce tanks or infantry fighting vehicles en masse. The French and Czechs are producing a bit more artillery systems but otherwise the Ukrainians have to produce their Bogdhana in more significant numbers to sustain their effort.

People say they are old capabilities, but they matter. Drones augment conventional capabilities like artillery, but if you lack the lethality of artillery, if you lack the mobility and shock and firepower of infantry fighting vehicles you are not going anywhere. These are all bullshit excuses for why we haven't geared up production. That we haven't done it is a huge problem.

The thing is, I don't even see a clear strategy in the West by the Americans or the Germans to really make Ukraine sustain another two or three years of such war of attrition. Stalemate is their plan, but I don't even see a plan for achieving that. For the nations that want victory I think the strategy rests on convincing Germany and the U.S. to facilitate that victory. But I don't think that strategy will work. I think we know the limitation of Washington and Berlin and we just have to work around it. We just have to organize it by those countries really willing to commit to a more ambitious strategic goal and put money on the table.

The French have realized what this war is about. The problem is the French have not put the resources on the table to achieve that end. The British have a much more sober and lasting position on the war and they know what this is and what needs to be done, but they haven't but the means on the table to facilitate that idea. France and the U.K. struggle economically and financially, but on the other hand it's our continent and our security. It is always easy to shift the blame and [say] the war goes a bad way because the Americans and Germans are the way they are. Which is partly true but it doesn't solve the problem.

We also need to talk to the Ukrainians and ask what they need for victory, what they need for maneuver and how shall we develop it. Do we just finance your companies producing certain assets, do you need the support of our companies producing certain assets in Ukraine? Do you need this to be produced with us and just shipped to you? We need to make a comprehensive defense industrial plan of what needs to be developed, what needs to be supplied, what needs to be researched. They need our support for a lot of things. Not just supply chains and drone things but also to go into the whole application of artificial intelligence to jam-proof weapon systems, new generations of loitering munitions. Artificial intelligence computing power is a force but it is in the West. They need our companies to get in the field and infrastructure to develop it. All of it requires thinking ahead in the long term. We'll have to do that, the willing nations have to do that. Don't wait for the Americans.

Is there a single initiative we should be doing right now to move closer to this goal? For example, would EU war loans be the first crucial step?

Yes, because it is a crucial step to enable it all. A lot of European countries don't have a huge defense industrial base and don't have a huge steep stockpile of material to donate. Once we organize new production across the continent, the issue of funding pops up, especially for smaller countries. Pooling capabilities, pooling money to acquire stuff jointly however we can get it. We might buy a lot of American stuff because they still have a defense industrial complex that actually works. But financing is key. It would give us a lot of room to adjust quickly to meet certain demands. For the time being, all procurement planning is so hamstrung by the shortage of resources for multi-year contracts. The common loan would make defense planning at scale much much easier. We did that for the coronavirus crisis. To me the war in Ukraine is a much more severe crisis. I think that a lot of European countries haven't really realized what is at stake for them.

Gustav Gressel is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, specializing in European defense policy, military affairs and Russia. Holding a doctorate, Gressel is Austrian by nationality and has previously worked at the Austrian Ministry of Defense, as well as serving in the Austrian military for five years.

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