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Home » Daniel Davis: Trump’s Threats Against Russia Backfire (Transcript)

Daniel Davis: Trump’s Threats Against Russia Backfire (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of 4x combat veteran and host of the Daniel Davis Deep Dive YouTube channel Lt. Col. Daniel Davis in conversation with Norwegian academic Prof. Glenn Diesen on “Trump’s Threats Against Russia Backfire”, August 1, 2025.

The Current State of the Ukrainian Battlefield

GLENN DIESEN: Hi, everyone, and welcome back. We are joined again by Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, four times combat veteran, Bronze Star Medal for Valor and Bronze Star Medal for service. Also the host of the Daniel Davis deep dive on YouTube. So welcome back to the program.

DANIEL DAVIS: Great to be here. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate it.

GLENN DIESEN: So I wanted to first ask you about what is happening in Ukraine at the moment, because the war has gone through many different stages as the technologies developed and especially the drone technology. In the beginning, of course, Russia thought they could pressure Ukraine and NATO into a peace agreement. Then it turned into war of attrition.

So we’ve gone through this. It looks as if at many points the Ukrainian army’s been incrementally moving towards collapse. But what’s happening now seems a bit different in terms of the Ukrainian army becoming exhausted. I was just wondering how you effectively read the battlefield at the moment.

The Mechanics of Modern Warfare

DANIEL DAVIS: Yeah, I kind of look at it in similar vein that the mechanics of war are playing out as they just nearly have to when you have such a dramatic imbalance in the inputs that go into a war of attrition that we have here, where you have one side, the Russians, that have an advantage in the air, they have an advantage in air defense, advantage in the armaments of war, their industrial capacity, and above all in the manpower pool, just the number of people from which they can draw.

And the other side, the Ukraine side, is deficient in all those categories. And in many ways, they’re actually growing further apart as time goes on, especially in the manpower pool as well. The only place where you have parity is in the drones. And that is a big issue. That’s a big one because it’s not decisive, but it has dramatically changed the nature of modern warfare on the conventional level.

And so that advancement in capacity has enabled the Ukraine side, with fewer men, to lure slower. It’s not going to change the outcome. It’s not going to change the nature of an attritional war because they still keep losing men every day. They still keep imposing casualties on the Russian side every day, but not as many because of how the Russians fight. And there’s just not as many Ukrainian men.

Shrinking Ukrainian Forces

And you’ve seen over the last four or five months especially. And Julian Rivka, the German journalist, has really chronicled a lot of this. The density of forces on the Ukraine side keeps shrinking. I’ve actually introduced or interviewed on my channel some journalist from the Ukraine side who’s been multiple times on the front line, and he said his own observation matches that, that he’s seen the number of Ukrainian men that have, that are targeted with defending a certain sector or a certain city or village. They keep shrinking. There’s not as many of them.

And now then you see the Russians are also, they’re advancing in how they’re fighting the war. And so you know, these so called “meat waves” that they are alleged to have done earlier on now then they’re not even allegedly doing that now then they minimize the number of troops that actually get to the point of contact. And they’re using a lot more flanking maneuvers much more effectively because they have the troops, they can do it, they have the reserves.

The Ukraine side does it. And when they start having a penetration or loss in one area, they have to move troops from somewhere else. But then the Russians will then increase the pressure in that point and they start going back. And it’s just like putting your finger in the die. You run out of fingers. But the holes keep coming and the water keeps leaking. And I think that’s kind of where we are.

Critical Battlefronts

And when you look at the current context of the battlefield, you see that the, especially around the Pokrovsk, which is kind of the central part and that’s definitely the Russian main effort right now. They have supporting efforts in Kupiansk on the northern part of the eastern front and in Kherson on the southern part of the eastern front.

But that Pokrovsk area and the Konstantinovka in the area, there’s a couple of different pockets forming there. Kupiansk is forming a pocket. Russian troops are there, they’re inside the city, in the outskirts there. They’re inside the city of Pokrovsk there. That literally could fall within a matter of weeks now. It’s been remarkable and it’s a testament to the fighting capability of the Ukraine side. It’s held out this long. But there is a breaking point and I think they’re getting close to it there.

And if that falls too, and depending on how it falls, it could open up additional avenues for the Russian army to exploit further. They’re already in the Dnipropetrovsk area. They’re also in the Sumy area, they’re in the Kharkiv area. So you see there’s many places where fighting is going on. The Ukraine side simply doesn’t have the manpower and the resources to forever defend and not eventually crack somewhere.

The Casualty Rate Narrative

GLENN DIESEN: It’s interesting though that given that Russia dominates in air power manpower, well, most of the areas and the Ukrainians are taking obviously then many more casualties. But why is it that we still see in the Western media that the Ukrainians enjoy favorable attrition rates, i.e. that the Russians are losing more men than Ukrainians because it doesn’t really make sense from any of the metrics we’re looking at on the battlefield.

DANIEL DAVIS: You know, I was actually on an X post live show with some folks that were very much pro Ukrainian.