American Power Extra: Putin’s New Plan to Break Ukraine

American Power

The episode examines Russia's strategic pivot from territorial conquest to a campaign of economic and infrastructural attrition in Ukraine.

Key takeaways

• Russia has achieved essentially zero net territorial gains since March 2026.
• Ukraine has reduced its locomotive fleet from 1,800 to 1,300 due to targeted Russian strikes on logistics.

Main topics

• Russia-Ukraine Economic Warfare
• Infrastructure Targeting

Notable quotes

Russian targeting officers are economists in reverse.

Conclusion

The conflict has transitioned into a race of economic endurance where

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:02) This is your host, Nat Towson. You're listening to an American Power Extra, a bonus episode with one of our experts designed to go deeper into the energy, military and geopolitical stories driving the news. If you're looking for more context, more history and a better understanding of the forces shaping global events, you're in the right place. Take it away, Chad. Speaker 2 (0:23) Russia is running into serious tactical and strategic problems in Ukraine. And because of this, Vladimir Putin is changing how he plans to win the war. For four and a half years, Russia has ground its way across Ukraine a few hundred meters at a time at an enormous cost in lives and equipment. But their gains are getting less and less. In fact, Russia has made essentially zero net territorial gains since March of this year. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces have pushed back around places like Kupyansk and Lyman. So if you're Putin, you have a real strategic problem. The whole premise of Russia's war of attrition was that Moscow could keep advancing, however slowly, until Ukraine ran out of manpower, equipment, or political will. That only works if you keep making progress. And increasingly, Russia is not. So Moscow appears to be leaning on a different approach, one that does not require taking more ground. Russia is trying to make war so economically and politically painful that Ukraine and the European countries backing Ukraine become more willing to accept Moscow's terms. Putin may be doing this by relying on long-range missile and drone strikes to force Ukraine to give in over the winter. And Russia has hit Ukrainian civilian infrastructure consistently since the first days of the invasion, so we're not really looking at a new type of war here. We're just seeing a change in the emphasis, scale, and the goal of the Kremlin. And so the question I think that will define the next phase of this war is, what happens when Ukraine and Russia can no longer win decisively on the battlefield? but still can do enormous damage to each other's economies. To begin to answer those questions, you have to go back to June of 2024 when Putin laid out his strategy for a long war. At that time, Moscow believed it had the edge, had more people, more industry, and the ability to replace losses over time. All they had to do was just keep attacking, keep taking ground, and eventually Ukraine would crack. And for a while, it worked. Russia took Avdiivka, and it kept pushing across Donetsk through 2025. It was slow and bloody, but they were advancing. But every Russian assault burned huge amounts of manpower, ammunition, armor, fuel, and logistics. And in 2026, Ukraine shifted and went exactly after those systems. Since then, Ukraine has stopped rushing to clear every Russian infiltrator that comes across the front lines, as they have now developed a consistent methodology for find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess using drones. This has freed up Ukrainian units to focus on hitting reinforcement nodes and supply lines behind the Russian front. Once Russian troops are cut off, they're much easier to eliminate. Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps, in an operation it calls Vivaldi, says it forced Russian forces back, thus allowing Ukraine to capture or kill hundreds of Russian soldiers and eliminate the salient that Russia had created near Lyman, retaking some 150-plus square kilometers of territory back from Russia. But this does not mean Russia's army is collapsing. Russia is starting to realize there is a difference between having the resources to keep fighting and having the resources to win. Russia can keep sending soldiers and building weapons, but what is becoming clearer is that they likely cannot take enough ground to force a settlement that is acceptable for Vladimir Putin. So this is where we see this pivot to total war. Because Russia's targeting now aims at economic impact, not battlefield gains, with Andrew Kramer writing in the New York Times that Russian targeting officers are economists in reverse. with the goal now to strike in a manner that lowers Ukrainian Speaker 1 (3:52) output, causes job loss, and creates bottlenecks in their economy. Speaker 2 (3:56) One example is Ukraine started this war with about 1,800 locomotives, but due to specific targeting of logistics assets by Russia, they're down to about 1,300 and are losing roughly one a day. Now, a locomotive does not sound like much. when you compare it to some of the more exquisite weaponry you would see on a battlefield, but Ukraine's rail network moves grain, steel, weapons, troops, and other military supplies. So every lost engine means delayed cargo, a cost to replace it, and less capacity. So the factories that are building the drones have to wait. The food that needs to get to either the port to be sold or to the people around the country is delayed. And as any logistician knows, the military competes for the same rail lines. And speaking of grain, Russia is also hitting grain silos during the summer harvest. Farmers who