Ukraine Military History

A Ukrainian 3rd corps ran a multi-brigade offensive and, by its commander's count, lost seven times fewer soldiers than Russia, most of them wounded. 250 prisoners — company commanders among them, most likely a battalion commander. 12,000 captured drones. Hundreds of armoured vehicles left where they stood. Asked when it happened, the man advising that corps answers: "I can't talk about the timeline at all" — because the weaknesses Third Corps exploited are still open. This is Operation Vivaldi, the campaign in the Lyman direction that broke Russia's plan for the year.

Our guest goes by the call sign Jackie. American, a self-described "forever sergeant," he is the senior American military advisor to Ukraine's Third Army Corps. He came to Ukraine in 2022, was wounded almost immediately, and spent his first weeks in a Ukrainian hospital working out who he was fighting for. Rob Lee joins as co-host, so you get the operational picture and the man inside it at the same time.

Along the way: the avalanche assault, ground drones appearing behind Russian lines, a remote-driven BTR-60 packed with ammunition, the mid-strike campaign and the cappuccino line — the last place you can get a barista-made cappuccino before the battle area; Ukraine's sits 23 kilometers back, Russia's is nearing 50. Why every infantryman is now a SIGINT specialist. How a unit that cannot legally punish anyone enforces discipline with trust, honesty and the after-action review. And the story of Grady Kurpasi, the Marine who should have been commanding part of the fight he died in as a rifleman.

Recorded in Kyiv.

Key moments:

0:00 - Maneuver is dead: the verdict Vivaldi broke

13:01 - "I can't talk about the timeline at all"

24:51 - What Vivaldi was for: defeat the northern pincer

40:50 - The avalanche assault, explained

47:40 - Ground drones behind Russian lines

55:04 - The mid-strike campaign: pulling the Russian line back

86:23 - The BTR-60 turned remote-driven bomb

92:26 - Third Corps history: 2014 and the men who knew the enemy

108:16 - The cappuccino line: the most honest metric of this war

113:22 - Culture beats technology: the mind is the weapon

137:37 - The training pipeline: 51, 24, and 14 days

154:43 - The AAR as the only discipline that works

163:11 - Grady Kurpasi: the story to stay for

Produced by the Borderlands Foundation.

Support our work: https://theborderlandsfoundation.org

Why War Matters — Sam's new Washington, DC talk for founders:

https://ukraineforfounders.com/talk/

All episodes: https://ukrainemilitaryhistory.org/

Guests:

Rob Lee: https://x.com/RALee85

Third Army Corps: https://ab3.army

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In the winter of 1855 the most powerful man in Russia put on a summer uniform, walked out into a St Petersburg winter, and inspected parades until it killed him. Nicholas I had started a war he was certain he could not lose: a million and a half men mobilised, the glory of beating Napoleon behind him, God on his side. He lost it in Ukraine. No decisive battle, no enemy at the gates of Moscow, half a million men gone, and an empire that simply ran out of ways to win.

Andriy Zagorodnyuk was Ukraine's Minister of Defence from 2019 to 2020, ran the Ministry's reform office from 2015, and chairs the Centre for Defence Strategies. He has also read the Crimean War for years as a hobby, in Soviet sources and Western ones both, which is why this conversation exists: Yevgeny Tarle writing under Stalin, and Orlando Figes writing in the West, and the same war coming out as two different books.

Along the way: the siege of Sevastopol was never a siege, because the northern road stayed open the whole time. The first war correspondent in history brought down a British government by telegraph while the tsar's own despatches took weeks to reach St Petersburg. By the end, British supplies reached Crimea faster from London than Russian supplies did from Moscow. The Crimean Tatars were the majority population, and 1850s prints of Simferopol show minarets and camels. And Russia, uninvaded, with millions still under arms, signed away its Black Sea fleet, because the coalition refused to leave a grey zone and the alternative was worse than losing.

The argument underneath it is the one to carry around. Analysts say there are two ways to win a war, attrition or annihilation. Zagorodnyuk says Crimea proves there is a third, and it is the one that happens to Russia: the aggressor has to win, it cannot live with uncertainty forever, and when every campaign fails the regime starts lying — not because it is dishonest first, but because it is incapable first. Russia does not lose by being beaten. It loses by running out of ways to win.

Recorded in Kyiv.

KEY MOMENTS 0:00 - Cold open: Nicholas I in a summer uniform 4:39 - Zagorodnyuk, unmanned systems, and the Centre for Defence Strategies 9:42 - Why the Crimean War is the war to study now 11:34 - The same regime 170 years apart, and its three priorities 12:38 - He wanted Istanbul and said he was protecting Christians 17:46 - Two libraries: Tarle under Stalin, Figes in the West 19:35 - Putin's rehabilitation of Nicholas I 27:32 - The siege of Sevastopol was never a siege 29:17 - The first war correspondent, the telegraph, and Florence Nightingale 34:15 - Supplies faster from London than from Moscow 37:09 - Losing without a single decisive battle 39:45 - Not attrition, not annihilation: running out of options 41:37 - Incapable first, lying second 46:34 - Precise affordable mass, and people spent like munitions 51:25 - The Crimean Tatars, blamed and punished 57:24 - The Paris Treaty, and the fleet Russia had to give up 62:56 - What would end this war the same way

Produced by the Borderlands Foundation. Support our work: https://theborderlandsfoundation.org

Why War Matters — Sam's San Francisco talk. Part I is free: https://ukraineforfounders.com/talk/

All episodes: https://ukrainemilitaryhistory.org/

Guest: Andriy Zagorodnyuk / Centre for Defence Strategies: https://defence.org.ua

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They did not win the hackathon. They did not even place. Twenty-four hours in a room in Los Angeles, two hours of sleep, a 3D printer that would not cooperate, and somebody putting dubstep on at four in the morning to keep everyone upright. The judges said "cool, sounds good" and moved on. Ian Laffey posted what they had built, slept eighteen hours, and woke up to millions of views and a phone full of messages. Today that technology flies on the front line in Ukraine.

Ian Laffey is co-founder and CEO of Theseus. They build navigation that lets a drone fly with no GPS at all, which is the single hardest constraint on a battlefield where satellite navigation is jammed across every inch of ground that matters. He had never touched a drone before February 2024, and he met his third co-founder in the hackathon room.

Sam Cook sat down with him in Kyiv for the clearest account yet of how a defense product actually gets proven. Ukraine, Ian argues, is the closest thing to a free market that exists anywhere in defense: units buy what works, at brigade level and below, often with donated money, and there is nowhere to hide. Ship a hundred million dollars of kit here and if it is not good enough it sits in a warehouse and everybody knows. His line: you can prove you can sell a hundred million dollars of something somewhere else, but you cannot prove it works anywhere but here.

He is unusually hard on himself about getting it wrong. On the first visit in November 2024 the drone was launched off a catapult his team had never seen, and the product failed outright. There are three ways to do this, he says, and two of them fail. Fly in for two days and take photographs, which is worse than not coming at all. Come for a fortnight at a time and watch every relationship go cold the moment you leave, because nobody here is sitting by a laptop waiting for your Zoom invite. Or move here. He moved here.

Then it turns to Washington. The three most critical technologies in this war, two of them American and neither of them military: the Chinese commercial electronics supply chain, Starlink, and AI. Why he thinks building interceptors in the United States makes little sense when there is nowhere to get the repetitions. And why SBIR dollars spent on slide decks made in America could instead fund American companies to develop and validate the same technology in the one place it is actually employed.

And the reason he is here at all: a best friend adopted from Ukraine just after independence, a father who told him never to hit first but to hit back as hard as he possibly can, and his own conclusion that it is a terrible circumstance, but in a lot of ways a privilege to get to work on things that matter.

Recorded in Kyiv, October 2026.

KEY MOMENTS 4:58 - "Completely by accident": what Theseus builds 17:49 - His best friend is Ukrainian, and "I'm not a sniper" 19:17 - Jack's adoption, and his father's rule about hitting back 22:49 - 24 hours, two hours of sleep, and dubstep at 4 a.m. 26:44 - "You can't delay your stupid moment" 27:09 - Getting your ass handed to you by the real world 36:40 - Every combat drone in the world is in one place 38:29 - The closest thing to a free market in defense 42:53 - Three ways to come to Ukraine, and two of them fail 45:44 - "I just need to move here" 56:43 - The three technologies deciding this war 61:12 - SBIR dollars for slide decks, and what they could buy here 71:41 - "I'm not putting you in a Signal group chat from California" 76:21 - Price it so Ukraine can field it, and the money follows

Produced by the Borderlands Foundation. Support our work: https://theborderlandsfoundation.org

Why War Matters — Sam's San Francisco talk. Part I is free: https://ukraineforfounders.com/talk/

All episodes: https://ukrainemilitaryhistory.org/

Guest: Ian Laffey / Theseus: https://www.theseus.us

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Before this podcast had a name, it had General David Petraeus.

This is the first interview the show ever recorded — Kyiv, 2023, during the counteroffensive, when Valerii Zaluzhnyi was still Commander-in-Chief and Petraeus had a new book a month from publication. We are releasing it from the vault now. The war has changed a great deal since. The argument has not changed at all.

He commanded the 101st Airborne in the invasion of Iraq, then the Surge, then ISAF in Afghanistan, then the CIA. Sitting with Sam Cook in Kyiv, he lays out the framework he and his students built at Harvard for what strategic leadership in war actually consists of — and then spends an hour testing it against every war he knows.

There are four tasks. Get the big ideas right. Communicate them through the breadth and depth of the organisation. Oversee their implementation. Then work out how the big ideas have to change, and start again. The order is the whole point. Get the first one wrong, he says, and it does not matter how good you are at the other three, because you are building on a foundation of sand.

Then he walks the cases. MacArthur, whose genius at Inchon is inseparable from his catastrophe at the Yalu — brilliance at one level of war is not the same skill as judgement at another. Korea, an outcome short of victory that has held for seventy years, and the man who actually delivered it: Matthew Ridgway, who took command after MacArthur was relieved. Vietnam, where America borrowed the model that had worked in Korea and applied it to a war that was not Korea, ran command tours of six months at most, made body count the measure of success, and did not get the big ideas right until 1968 — more than a decade too late to turn it around. Iraq, where de-Ba'athification without reconciliation helped produce a full Sunni-Shia civil war in Baghdad, and where the eventual turn meant reconciling with 103,000 combatants: 80,000 Sunni insurgents and 23,000 Shia militia. And Afghanistan, which he warned Rumsfeld in 2005 would be the longest of the long wars, where the inputs were not right for nine years and then held for six or seven months.

The same four tasks, he argues, explain Netflix and Kodak as well as they explain Baghdad. Kodak held more than two thousand patents on digital photography and still failed to act on the fourth task in time.

His closing comparison is the one that has aged into the present: the strategic leadership of America's partners in Afghanistan, set against the strategic leadership of its partners in Ukraine. The best and the worst on full display.

Recorded in Kyiv, 2023. Introduced in 2026.

KEY MOMENTS 0:00 - From the vault: why a 2023 interview, now 9:50 - Could the British have won the American Revolution? 14:53 - The four tasks of a strategic leader 19:10 - Battle rhythm: how a commander spends his time 25:40 - "A foundation of sand" 26:30 - The same four tasks in business: Netflix and Kodak 31:12 - MacArthur: genius at Inchon, catastrophe at the Yalu 34:10 - Korea, and the quiet excellence of Matthew Ridgway 42:50 - Vietnam: the big ideas arrive in 1968, a decade late 46:30 - Body count, six-month tours, and constant churn 56:30 - Baghdad: a full Sunni-Shia civil war 60:00 - Reconciliation, and 103,000 combatants 67:50 - Afghanistan: why it looked easier, and was not 73:10 - Nine years before the inputs were right 76:00 - The Achilles heel of the whole defence concept

Produced by the Borderlands Foundation. Support our work: https://theborderlandsfoundation.org

Why War Matters — Sam's San Francisco talk. Part I is free: https://ukraineforfounders.com/talk/

All episodes: https://ukrainemilitaryhistory.org/

Guest: Gen. David Petraeus (US Army, ret.) — "Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine", written with Andrew Roberts

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In the autumn of 2022, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi pulled a book off his shelf — force ratios, artillery counts, manpower tables — and told the woman across from him that if he followed it, Ukraine would lose, for sure. Then he gave her a job: robotize the front line.

That woman is Eveline Buchatskiy. A Berkeley-trained chemical engineer who moved to Kyiv in 2007, whose first Ukrainian investment became Preply, and who helped lead a company with 850 engineers in Kyiv when the invasion began. In July 2023 she launched D3 — Dare to Defend Democracy — a pure-play defense fund at a moment when no bank would open an account for one. Three years later: 27 portfolio companies across air, land, sea and the software binding them.

Sam Cook and Rob Lee sat down with her in Kyiv for the map of how defense innovation actually gets funded and proven. Why she tells founders to drop the dual-use disguise. How a hustler goes from idea to procured product in three months. Merops and the first reliable intercepts of Shaheds. The German-Ukrainian JV that turned battlefield credibility into a $128 million Bundeswehr contract for 10,000 strike drones. And the unit that bolted Starlink onto a 100km drone and more than doubled its reach — what Eveline calls free R&D from the best military laboratory on earth.

Then it turns to Washington. Russia is doubling its Unmanned Systems Forces from 87,000 to 165,000. The US Army disbanded its one experimental drone battalion. Policy still takes six months to approve one change to a fielded drone. The Pentagon just cancelled a lessons-learned briefing from the Ukrainian officers offering to give it. If America learns less from this war than China does, we have failed.

And her definition of victory: not a line on the map, but true independence, a young generation that comes home, and a 900-year problem settled for good.

Recorded in Kyiv, August 2026.

KEY MOMENTS 5:15 - The road from chemical engineering to Kyiv 15:12 - Zaluzhnyi: "Your job is to robotize the front line for me" 16:46 - July 2023: capital in hand, and no bank would take it 19:01 - The thesis: drop the dual-use disguise and commit 20:54 - Certified and procured in three months, if you hustle 26:44 - What AI is actually doing on the battlefield 37:06 - The coming revolution in radars 42:25 - "If you're not in Ukraine, you're not in defense" 48:57 - Six months to approve one change to a program of record 52:10 - Russia doubles Unmanned Systems Forces to 165,000 63:23 - Merops, and the $128 million Bundeswehr contract 69:10 - What victory actually means

Produced by the Borderlands Foundation.

Support our work: https://theborderlandsfoundation.org

Why War Matters — Sam's talk for MilTech Founders: https://ukraineforfounders.com/talk/

All episodes: https://ukrainemilitaryhistory.org/

Guests: Eveline Buchatskiy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eveline-buchatskiy Rob Lee: https://x.com/RALee85

Built & Promoted with https://storyfunnels.ai

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🎓 Why War Matters — Sam's San Francisco talk for Defence Tech Founders https://ukraineforfounders.com/talk/

Rob Lee and Francis Farrell have just come back from a week on the front line — Zaporizhzhia, the Donbas, Izium and Kharkiv on the way home. This is the debrief.

They arrive with an argument that has a deadline in it. The first half of 2026 went better for Ukraine than expected; the second half is turning. Russia's advances are slower than last year, but they are landing in the worst possible places — the approaches to Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last great cities of Donetsk Oblast. Sloviansk is where this war started in April 2014, and some of the brigade commanders defending it today fought there then.

The thing that worries both of them most is not a weapon. It is the weather. Last October, four days of heavy fog blinded the drones over Pokrovsk and let two companies of Russian infantry into the city, and they could not be cleared out. October is coming again, and Russian forces are closer to Kramatorsk and Sloviansk than they were. The next month decides whether there is a window.

Along the way: what the kill zone actually measures — not FPV range, but how far an infantryman walks to his position, which around Kostiantynivka is fifteen to twenty kilometres on foot. Why Mavics pushed back from the line mean you need more crews to keep the same eyes in the sky, so every technological problem turns back into a manpower problem. And what a contested city really looks like now, with Russian and Ukrainian infantry in the same building using different entrances, both under orders not to engage, because both sides want the drones to do the killing.

CHAPTERS

00:00 A week on the front — where the war actually stands

09:54 The narrative roller coaster, and why it misleads

13:00 Drapatyi's principles — can the brigades feel it?

17:18 Inspections stopped, the counterattack order delegated

22:36 The kill zone, measured in how far a man walks

25:44 Underground, logistics, and the confused city fight

28:24 Infiltration is not a new problem for these units

30:30 What a unit can solve with welders and engineers

33:35 Kostiantynivka: why infantry still decide urban fights

36:00 Artillery now deters more than it destroys

38:13 Glide bombs and Western aviation: still no answer

42:10 The sledgehammer, and where Ukraine has the edge

46:30 Middle strike: what it achieved, how Russia adapted

48:37 Autonomous drones — no radio link, no human in the loop

51:20 Jet-powered Gerans, and the intercept problem

55:00 Starlink jammers, and Russia's Rassvet constellation

59:00 What changes if Ukraine can strike into Russia

62:18 October, fog, and the month that decides the winter

66:00 Dobropillia: a five-to-one drone disadvantage

68:10 Russia's hybrid war reaches Germany

73:00 Would Europe actually come? Narva and the Baltics

75:00 Only Ukraine and Russia know how to fight this war

78:10 The defence of Ukraine as the defence of your own security

80:08 Russia only respects strength

83:20 Escalation, Ratcliffe, and talking to Moscow

87:28 The men who were in Sloviansk in 2014

Support the Borderlands Foundation: https://theborderlandsfoundation.org

🎧 Listen & subscribe:

All episodes: https://ukrainemilitaryhistory.org/

https://www.youtube.com/@UkraineMilitaryHistory

Guests:

Rob Lee: https://x.com/RALee85

Francis Farrell: https://x.com/francisjfarrell

Ukraine's answer to the question every war asks — not who invents a weapon, but who fields it fast enough to win — has a name, and a CEO.

Andrii Hrytseniuk runs Brave1, the platform the Ukrainian government built in 2023 to connect industry, combat units, ministri