Ep 5 – Rob Lee: Back from the Front — Ukraine Closes the Deep-Strike Gap (June 2026)

Rob Lee is back in Kyiv after another round of frontline visits — from Zaporizhzhia to Donetsk to Kharkiv — talking directly with frontline commanders and the R&D teams building the war's newest capabilities. In this episode Sam Cook stands in for Dmytro Putiata and interviews Rob on what's actually changed as of early June 2026.

The headline shift: deep strike is no longer Russia's game. Ukraine is now hitting at operational depth too — with cheap, scalable drones, corps-level strike assets like Hornets, and a brigade-to-corps reform that's giving commanders real ownership of their battlespace. Rob walks through where the front is genuinely different from a year ago, where it's still grinding (Kostiantynivka, the Kramatorsk–Sloviansk line), and why he wouldn't be surprised to see successful Ukrainian armor assaults this year.

A granular, on-the-ground read from the analyst with the access to get it.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro — who Rob is and this June trip

04:58 The front as of early June 2026

06:03 Why map movements mislead — reading the front

08:19 What he saw: Zaporizhzhia to Donetsk to Kharkiv

09:00 Is Russia slowing? Manpower and priorities

11:43 Corps get Hornets — striking deeper behind the line

12:51 Brigade-to-corps reform: commanders own the battlespace

15:03 Dobropillia: redeployments and Rubicon

15:55 The cheap-drone revolution — $4,000 recon, Mavic + Starlink

18:00 Counter-Shahed and the interceptor problem

20:31 Starlink on UGVs — why it's indispensable

21:52 Europe and the US stepping up production

24:46 Corps UAS regiments and reduced vulnerability

26:15 Where it's still hard: Kostiantynivka

26:47 Kramatorsk–Sloviansk and the high-ground threat

32:23 UGVs: the gas-powered casevac "mule"

33:07 Only 20% of the UGVs they need

33:48 AI targeting and camera-guided turrets

35:26 A WWI analogy for this moment

36:06 Why Ukrainian armor assaults may return (Zabrodsky callback)

37:31 Operational depth: where Ukraine now has the edge

38:21 FP-2s and the middle-strike payload gap

39:55 1,000+ drones a night — the deep-strike picture

40:34 Deep strike is no longer Russia's game

41:23 Putin doubling down, and why the war turned

42:45 Drones = 80%+ of casualties now

43:33 Recap of the trends

46:40 Wrap-up

Rob Lee is a senior fellow at FPRI and a former US Marine. Host Samuel Cook is the founder of the Ukraine Military History Institute and a former US Army officer who taught Russian history at West Point.

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