Adam Grant (44:55)
Sure. So looking at it from a few different perspectives, first the implications for the Russian side, I think we have to separate that into effects on Russia's military power and capabilities and then effects on leadership calculus. So on the military capabilities, I agree with Nastya that we're still in the phase of understanding the damage assessments. And what I've seen is somewhere around a dozen aircraft confirmed hit, you know, pretty much inoperable. But it's going to take us still a few days or weeks to really understand that. And we'd be looking to a lot of the kind of open source military analysts who really scour these satellite images to understand, you know, the degree of damage to individual aircraft and so on and so forth. But I would say that certainly this is going to have a meaningful impact on Russia's, you know, sort of tactics in and use of, of air launched standoff munitions and their ability to just sort of, you know, hold these aircraft kind of out in the open at different airfields and think that they're invulnerable to attack. Clearly that has changed, you know, the thinking of the Russian military leadership and the leadership of the Russian air force. But you know, unfortunately, Russia's aerial attacks on Ukraine, I mean, they don't only come from bombers. A lot of it is sea launched, land based and so on. So this is only a small component of the capabilities used to target Ukraine. And so I don't expect this to, you know, stop basically all Russian capabilities of striking Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure. That's on the capability standpoint, on the leadership intentions. I think there's a bit of a, a duality here because on the one hand this is clear humiliation for Putin, but when we've seen him, you know, backed into a corner, he tends to escalate his way out of it. And so I would expect in the near term, in the next several days, some sort of, I would call it, you know, spectacular in quotes, theatrical and probably very damaging escalation coming from Russia because he will think to himself that he has to show that, you know, he's not going to let this fly without any kind of punishment. So there's been warnings actually this morning, you know, early evening cave time, about a launch of an Oreshnik IRBM again. I mean, there was one already launched against dnipro. Could another one be launched against Kyiv, you know, and have more devastating consequences? We'll have to see what happens here. But so certainly in the near term, I expect some amount of Russian retaliation as there was retaliation in the past for, you know, the, the 2022 attacks on the Crimean Bridge and so on and so forth in the medium to long term. I think this is where it gets interesting because the logic, as I understand it from the Ukrainian side was to create a situation of enough pain and risk on the side of Russian air capabilities such that Russia de facto begrudgingly enters into some sort of air cessation of hostilities in the manner that was agreed in the Black Sea. So basically, after Ukraine demonstrated its capability to sink, you know, Russian ships in the Black Sea without having its own navy, but using a combination of, you know, drones and undersea vehicles and so on and so forth. You know, at first, when Ukraine had started the strike campaign, Russia retaliated by hitting a lot of Ukrainian port infrastructure. And it got hot for a while and then Russia sort of realized that Ukraine could do serious damage to commercial shipping in the Black Sea. And so it sort of took its hands off. And so Ukraine has created a situation such that it has negated Russia's ability to kind of use its sea based capabilities and targeting of Ukrainian port infrastructure. I think they're trying to replicate that in the air. I could See that, you know, coming about over the next couple of months as we continue with these ceasefire negotiations. But again, I don't think it's going to be an immediate kind of point A to point B, because the Russians, Putin is going to have to show like he's still in charge. Then there's the, the final point on the kind of perceptions of Ukraine's partners. From what I can tell, the United States didn't know about this operation in advance, which is actually a tremendous credit to the Ukrainian intelligence services that they managed for 18 months to plan this extraordinarily complex, ambitious operation without their main partners finding out about it, with no leaks in the Ukrainian system, which is actually, actually quite notorious for leaking, obviously, without the Russians finding out. So kudos to them for pulling that off, just from a pure operational secrecy and security standpoint. But the United States Trump administration appears to have been taken off guard. I haven't seen any definitive statements from the administration saying, you know, rah, Rah, go Ukraine, or this is a disaster and leading to World War Three. I think it's kind of, they're still trying to say, sense what's going on here. I think for the Europeans and for more of those who want to make an argument for supporting Ukraine, the clearest point here to get is that Ukraine, you know, it may be on, on the ropes is a bit of a strong term, but very vulnerable on the battlefield. And the trends on the front line are not looking good. But Ukraine is, to rephrase what President Trump said to President Zelensky in the Oval Office, Ukraine still does have some cards to play. So Ukraine is not out of the game entirely. Ukraine has its own agency, its ability to inflict damage on Russia that doesn't depend directly on Western support. And so I think that is an argument, again, for continued support here, that Ukraine is not on the verge of collapse and it's still able to pull these things off. So overall, it's kind of a mixed picture. We're going to have to look and see, particularly for the battle damage assessments, to understand what the reality, military and strategic implications of this are.
