---
title: "On The Fronts: Hegseth, Haiti, and Russia's Climbing Casualties."
description: "Eleven absent Democrats saved Hegseth from impeachment, hacked Kremlin data puts Russian dead above 500,000, and Bukele's 2,500 troops in Haiti look less like a rescue mission than a long stay."
url: https://fronts.co/podcast/on-the-fronts-hegseth-haiti-and-russias-climbing-casualties.md
canonical: https://fronts.co/podcast/on-the-fronts-hegseth-haiti-and-russias-climbing-casualties/
datePublished: 2026-11-13T17:00:00.000Z
dateModified: 2026-11-13T18:03:50.000Z
author:
  - name: Fronts Staff
    url: https://fronts.co/authors/fronts-team/
publisher: Fronts
image: "https://media.fronts.co/cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,height=630,fit=cover,gravity=auto,quality=80,format=auto/images/articles/on-the-fronts-hegseth-haiti-and-russias-climbing-casualties-5b2a6be9.png"
type: NewsArticle
language: en
audio: https://media.fronts.co/audio/on-the-fronts-hegseth-haiti-and-russias-climbing-casualties/950150fd2e8b1e6201e29e2096eb9260774d0dbc667aeb65d3f6c98c5b0d9002.mp3
tokens: 14075
---

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Greetings, citizens of the world, and welcome to On the Fronts, your one-stop shop for in-depth. analysis of the biggest political stories of the week. I'm your host, Oli Carpenter, and I'm joined by our resident geopolitical experts, Evan Moloney and Karl Moran. Today we're talking about Pete Hegseth surviving his Congressional performance review, the numbers the Kremlin don't want you to know about in Ukraine, and El Salvador's war on gangs getting a Caribbean spin-off.

But before we get to that, right, Kyle, give me the rundown on what's going on with SEC war at the moment. Current Secretary of War Pete Hegseth survived an impeachment attempt by Congress this week. But what was he being impeached for?

Yeah, so this was actually relatively unexpected, given that even a number of Republican members of Congress expected him to basically go down in flames when the final vote came to pass. Ultimately, 11 Democrats just simply did not show up. Some of that was blamed on traffic, but other parts of that were blamed on less coincidental situations.

So Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic majority leader, was actually in her district in San Francisco for some event. There's all sorts of speculation as to how legitimate or not legitimate that is. But essentially, outgoing Republican Representative Thomas Massey, who has been a longtime Trump critic, a longtime Hegseth critic and arch foreign policy isolationist, introduced privileged motions to impeach Pete Hegseth on eight separate articles, for most of which have to do with the iran war moving forward given that this did ultimately fail what i think is going to happen moving ahead is that once the new democratic congress is sworn in they're going to kick start another round of impeachments because this, to be clear, did not kill the impeachment situation.

It simply referred it to committee. That is a way of delaying to the point of semi killing it. But moving forward, I seriously think the next Congress will pick this up.

There are a lot of Democrats who are all but itching to impeach Pete Hegseth, who has really become quite a lightning rod on the left in the United States. And then moving forward, that has all sorts of ramifications for the Iran war, which I'm sure we'll get into today. Isn't it always great to know when things in your country could change?

And the movement's noticed in a big way, but because of traffic and a few work commitments, things are different. It's an interesting one, isn't it? When you say, Carl, when you say that he's being impeached mainly around the Iran war, can you go into a little bit of depth and just explain to the listeners what parts of the impeachment are related to Iran specifically and just his role as Sec War in general?

Yeah, so inherently, some of this is a little bit sort of uncertain as to the ultimate legality of it. A lot of it contains pertains to the Iran war, whether the president had congressional and needed congressional approval to go to war against the Islamic Republic, whether follow up attacks throughout were unconstitutional. Pete Hegseth, according to Representative Massey, was in violation of the Constitution by doing this, but ultimately this is a bit nebulous because the Secretary of Defense serves at the pleasure of the President, and he was carrying out Donald Trump's orders, which would have been his defense had he had to take the stand, so to speak, in Congress.

But ultimately, I don't I don't really know which side will ultimately prevail on this. This has been a long standing legal question here stateside where Congress sometimes makes the point argument that the executive needs congressional approval to intervene militarily abroad while the executive almost always insists it does not need that so we have something here called the war powers resolution that Congress passed after the Vietnam War that's part of what was going on here. But ultimately, the problem being that every president since Nixon has, of both parties, have very strongly objected to the idea that they need congressional approval or that Congress even has the constitutional right to limit the president's Article 2 powers to intervene.

So that's going to be a pretty big question mark. And I think until the Supreme Court ultimately weighs in on that one way or the other, it's going to probably remain that way. Yeah, because like you say, I mean, most of it's related to the Iran war with Hegseth, but also the constitutionality of the war in Iran.

But then there's also some elements of it as well as such as the unlawful potentially military operations in Yemen, the bombing of the drug smuggling boats and even the capture of former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. I believe that was back at the start of the year maybe last year there's a lot going on in terms of Pete Hegseth's situation at the moment my question I guess and feel free to jump in Evan if you want to answer this one Carl made a very good point is that he's Hegseth is serving at the behest of the president so why are we why are why are impeachment proceedings being brought against the secretary of War and not the President who he was potentially answering to? Yeah, so really this comes down to a question of political will.

So Hegseth, you mentioned, you alluded to it, he's being impeached on a number of different issues, some of which have to do with Iran, others of which have to do with Venezuela, with the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific strikes, and others as well. The issue here, Clint, is in the U.S., the Republican Party remains overwhelmingly loyal to Donald Trump for a number of reasons, partly because he's commenced quite a bit of support within the party, just genuinely from Congress people and also ordinary supporters, and also because he retains both the financial power and the political power to essentially challenge several Republican challengers at any Republican incumbent during a future election and ensure that they can't really run for their seat and have any hope of winning it again so for that reason with the congress so split right now between democrats and republicans it's very difficult to see a world where enough Republicans with great ranks and take action against Trump directly. That is not the case for Hegseth and for some of the other really, really controversial or odious figures who a lot of Republicans even don't really have very much taste left for.

So you can think of a couple folks who have been not a patriot, who have stepped away from the White House during this term already. So Pam Bondi was the Attorney General. Kristi Noem was the Secretary of, oh my goodness, the Interior?

Homeland Security, I apologize. That role that is not coming to mind right now, but I'm sure Kyle will jump in and correct me on this at the moment. But all of that is to say, it is much, much easier enough for the politically feasible to go after an unpopular deputy than it is to go after Trump himself.

And even with this new Congress coming in where the Democrats are going to have much more overwhelming majorities, those majorities will allow them to impeach whoever they want but not to convict in the senate they're going to need republicans to cross over anyway and they have a much better chance of having that happen if they're impeaching notably unpopular deputies rather than trump himself yeah you were you were right there evan she was homeland secretary homeland security secretary but in general i do think that there was a lot of politics going on here. So and not unfairly either. Hegseth has been very controversial, even within Republican circles.

Keep in mind, so the House only needs a simple majority to impeach but the senate needs a two-thirds majority to actually convict and remove from office so inherently if you're really going to put turn up the pressure on this guy you need somebody who's going to be able to clear that two-thirds 66 seats very 67 seats that's a very tall order hegseth is basically like the guy in the administration in my opinion who could do this tom tillis has absolutely flamed the guy constantly for in some of the most creative ways i've seen in politics i believe the way he described hegseth was that he's a man allergic to competence, which we all know someone like that, don't we? I've never heard a politician describe somebody in their own party like that, though. So that I mean, that really that really speaks for itself.

And I can tell you that Tillis is not alone in said assessment there. So part of that does come down to this. The other thing comes down to who introduced this.

So again, this was Thomas Massey, who is very isolationist. He thinks that he was very opposed to the intervention with Venezuela, very opposed to many of the foreign policy agendas of both this administration as well as pretty much every US president ever, or at least within our lifetime. So a lot of that does sort of come down to this sort of shows where he stands on that stuff.

The big headline stuff was all about Iran. And I have to imagine that moving forward, if Democrats do take this up again, which I think they will in the next Congress it's going to be mostly Iran focused. I think there's also, Carl, a question of timing here.

Both of you have mentioned that this is likely to then be picked back up again in January once the congressmen and women who were elected and it's going to switch to Democrat. When they come into term in January, the next Congress is almost certainly going to do this anyway. So there's a question to be said about why now?

Why Massey, for one, why now? Is this a genuine attempt to remove Hegseth? Is it a political stunt designed to embarrass the Trump administration?

Is it about wrestling foreign policy control away from the executive? Is it about steering the Republican Party away from isolationism or sorry, from interventionism? Help me out here.

What are the what are the key motivations for doing this now? Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to some timing about the election. So in full transparency, the motion was introduced by Massey before the election.

So it's not entirely a result of the blue wave that we saw or blue tsunami, perhaps better, more accurate. But I have to imagine this was sort of Massey's last hurrah because Massey lost his primary. It was one of the most expensive U.S. House primaries in American history, potentially the number one most expensive, I believe.

Massey became a lightning rod on the right for all sorts of isolationism, in particular with Israel. So a lot of very pro-Israel groups spent big on taking him down, and they were successful on that. So he is outgoing and i think this was sort of one last hurrah for him before he exits stage right there so okay so it's partially it's political from his end because he's not going to get the chance to do this again potentially but bring it forward himself so he does want to embarrass it's a little bit of all the above i guess evan do you have anything to add on that?

Evan Brand: Yeah, I do want to just share one other piece of PTHF news. He's been in the, in the headlines again, recently, just yesterday for a slightly different reason, but something that I think will continue to have public opinion against him. So at the, in the U S that the Washington DC, we have was for the tomb of the unknown soldier.

This is a place where it was kind of among the two soldiers were unidentified and we're not you know, we're not brought home with their families and loved ones being able to identify. Yeah, like an artwork. Beautiful, beautiful place.

Yeah. And yesterday, Hegseth and a group of affiliates of some kind were there. And so when you're there, it's, so decorum is very strictly observed at that site there's a guard on patrol at all times they will you know point their weapon and scream at you if you know step out of line in terms of either volume or conversation or whatever maybe and I guess Hegseth and a bunch of people just came down there yesterday and were i guess somebody had laughed and they got a very fast and loud pressing down from the soldier guarding that tomb so not a huge political needle mover but certainly a public opinion ding against the you know kind of self-titled Secretary of War, again at a time when, you know, really he is not helping his own case right now.

No, it's certainly a poor one for the optics on that one because, as you say, the respect there is so important in general for the military in the US, but certainly at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. There is something to be said as well about the kind of the wider implications of how Americans and veteran families and you know combat deployed families a feeling about Hegseth and about the Republican Party in general at the moment I mean we all know about what the states will sorry what the status of life was like and the conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln which was deployed for a record time and we also know that there's some been some issues specifically around the Iran war and then the reporting of deaths people don't take that stuff lightly over in the states you know especially military families so it'll be interesting to see if the if eventually the blame there comes down purely on hexeth's head i guess my only other question from all of this would be what does this mean for the war in Iran right well you know Hegseth was the one who was largely in charge of prosecuting the war in Iran whether he has succeeded or failed is up to one's own opinion I would say personally I think he has failed to make those military objectives he had set out to do but what does that mean then going forward if that guy doesn't seem to have the backing of Congress going forward yeah so it's kind of the big question right now about whether or not Trump is looking to draw down the war. He's kind of been of two minds on this, if we look at his public statements and then his policy actions.

So in public, he's been kind of almost contrite about the war recently, kind of saying, you know, we may have gone too far, we need to stand down. We don't anticipate there being any renewed strikes anytime soon, so on and so forth. At the same time, Iraq is under pressure to shut down all of its border crossings with Iran.

There have been rumblings within the Pentagon about a new initiative to kind of close down all of the entry routes in and out of Iran and continue to blockade economic traffic that way. We've seen continued limited strikes on Iran's Qeshan Island, where a bunch of air defense assets are located, and there's some other military activity. So by no means are we out of the woods here yet.

But I think the bigger question is Trump looking to draw this down anyway? And then is there some kind of political advantage to him to say, "Oh, well, the war got out of hand. It was all Hegseth's fault.

He had us do things we wouldn't have ordinarily done." That, I think, raises some other issues for Trump in terms of, you know, people being able to ask, well, why was your Secretary of War running these kind of campaigns without your enforcement? But even still, if there is any political will in the White House to distance themselves from the war in a really substantial way, Hank Sackler is a very convenient scapegoat right now. He's kind of like Trump's off-ramp for Iran.

Yeah, it's very tough. So he is the guy who, if you want a clean break and you want to disperse blame to somebody else, he is the guy you throw under the bus. All right.

Well, that makes a lot of sense. Kyle, what do you have to add? Yeah, so I think that's really insightful there because a lot of times people can present the Trump administration as being monolithic or entirely united behind bland, generic maga whatever this means it's it's not it's it can be quite divided so you have more some more traditional i'm not gonna i don't love using the term neocon because it's like so overused to the point of not meaning anything anymore but you know marco rubio types you also have pete hexeth who is like so pro war with Iran it's not even funny but he's not in like the traditional neocon sense at all either so ultimately losing Hegseth would who would take like the ultimate role as scapegoat here would nevertheless lead to the removal of somebody who has been very forcefully pushing for a resumption of force against iran including post-election So just before the election, he flew, I believe to Israel somewhere in the Middle East, at least to meet with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

And since the election, Netanyahu has been calling Trump, according to the Times of Israel, on a daily basis, urging a resumption of continued force against the Islamic Republic. So on that would be losing this guy in the administration would definitely shift things. Now, that obviously raises the question of, OK, well, who would come next?

Who would follow him? We could easily find ourself with a Pete Hegseth Jr. I don't think anybody's going to truly be as Hegseth as Hegseth himself. But, you know, you can find somebody almost as far out there.

But moving forward, I think that what happens next with Iran is going to come down in part to that because Trump habitually listens to people around him, even though he never really will admit this. When people are in his ear about certain different things, they really do shape the way the administration that's interesting so do you think that whoever gets chosen next like you say do you think it will be hexeth light who someone is going to be selected principally for loyalty or do you think it's there might be a view for the administration to move past this period of foreign policy and into something new loyalty is always going to be front and center for Trump when he's choosing somebody. On the foreign policy approach, I'm really going to wait and see on that one, though, because it sort of depends on does Trump take away from the midterms that he's got to rein himself in a bit here or are we talking he's going to double down anyway right now it seems as though he's leaning towards the former but ultimately i think that we're just gonna have to wait and see on that one.

Okay. Alrighty. Evan, you had something to add?

Yeah, there is kind of an open question here about whether or not Trump's successor to Hegseth, whoever he may choose, will be able to get through a democratic control Senate. So in a way, right, if Trump wanted to move off on Hegseth, this impeachment was kind of his last shot to get Hegseth out, really quickly introduce somebody who was much more ideologically in line with him, and get them rushed through the confirmation process before the new Congress takes over. Now that Hegseth is going to be finishing out at least the end of this Senate and House, that's no longer an option.

So any new replacement is going to have to get through and kind of get the Democrats approval. There is a way around this, which is that Trump can appoint somebody in an acting role for a while. This is something that he often does where they can kind of serve in the role and they don't have to be confirmed.

But there's kind of an expiration date on that. You can't really do it indefinitely. And so if Trump does want to bring in somebody who was really closely ideologically aligned, he's going to struggle mightily to do that and to have them confirmed by the Democrats in the Senate if this current term is allowed to expire and they just take the Senate as they're expected to do the last few weeks.

Great. Well, that's Iran. That's Iran and Hegseth, and if he's failed impeachment, he's going to be potentially on the lam for that one again come January, so be on the lookout for that depending on if it's him or if it's someone else in the administration.

It's going to be an interesting one. Keep an eye on it. Let's talk Ukraine.

Let's pivot to Ukraine for a minute, because this week, some pretty shocking numbers have come out of Ukraine, haven't they? Haven't they, Evan? Because a couple of hacking groups have leaked sorry, they compromised Russia's official statistic agency, Rostap.

And it's proving very controversial in terms of the numbers coming about coming out about the number of russian war dead that is correct so the releases that kind of were from two hacking groups one of them is a belarussian opposition group the other one is a ukrainian linked group i'm not sure how close they are to the ukrainian government but in any case, they got into LOSTAT, which is the internal record-keeping agency of all of Russia. And basically what happens in there is every time somebody dies in Russia, they are logged into that system, and there is identify information attached like where they were from, who their relatives are, so on, and then a code to identify why they died. And so essentially these two groups got into that system.

They stole, I think it was 29 terabytes of data, including the last, sorry, the last 11 million deaths of its own file in Russia. Of those, they have brought out around 400,000 who appear to have died directly because of the war, who have gone over into Ukraine, who have been either shot, blown up, whatever it may be. And then quite a few more bring the number up above 500,000, if you include people who have died of illness while they were deployed in Ukraine, people who were killed in the occupied territories without a cause of death listed, as often happens when people are killed over there who are maybe not serving in the most official capacity with the Russian military.

People who were killed on Russian soil in what was called, quote unquote, terrorist attacks, which is what often Ukrainian drone strategies are labeled as. So this total goes way, way up and over 500,000. And there's really good reason to believe that the total could be even higher than that, because that data is only accurate through late August what it takes a while for it will get added to that database so it's not unclear that up until August it's a full list but then the last two months according to Ukraine according to European intelligence agencies who have kind of invalidated by this data right if you take them at face value these last couple of months have i mean easily a hundred thousand russian taffetes across september and october in a war where we're now seeing close to a 50 50 split of till to wooden which is much more than the usual ratio we see which is usually like three wounded to one person killed there are a lot of reasons for this foliage is disappearing so there's less room to hide from drones russian commanders are getting more and more kind of desperate to push new conspires out to the front line when they get them so all of that is to say this has been an incredibly deadly couple of months that if you look at you know the numbers of the last two months as reported by ukraine if you add in the missing who are not counted in the still if you add in people who serve who are from paramilitaries if you count in north koreans if you count in people who've been employed from abroad as mercenaries, the death toll the Russians signed up as conflict could very easily be above 550,000 to 600,000 when all of those numbers are put together, if not more than that.

Then, of course, you have the Ukrainian fatalities. All of that put together, we mentioned this in a video that came out on Wednesday, you could very credibly make the argument by the end of this year that this has been the deadliest war of the 21st century thus far, if these numbers are correct, which, as of now, outside validators seem to believe them to be. That's very interesting, isn't it?

Like you say, it's just a staggering amount of death and destruction, and that's pure death. I mean, this upper range number that's been bandied around at the moment is about 450,000 dead. That's not casualties either you know which includes like you know captured wounded etc that's confirmed deceased and that's absolutely staggering because we know the casualty numbers for russia have been well over a million by now, but even still, 450,000 dead, like you say Evan, and it may well be higher, and there may even be a chance that not even the Kremlin truly knows exactly how many people are gone.

So it's just absolutely incredible in the absolute worst way Kyle drumming over to you for a sec how confident are we do we think that these are genuine numbers from that are coming out here because there is a question to be said about we have to be skeptical in the informational environment we've got especially when it comes to Russia and Ukraine how confident are we? Overall, the reception has been that a lot of this does seem to be quite accurate. And I do just want to throw in some context here.

So because sometimes when we get bogged down in a bunch of numbers, it can almost remove some of the scale here just for comparison in the nine-year war that the soviet union fought in afghanistan they lost about 15 000 one to five thousand soldiers so just for context i mean that is a staggering difference that we're talking 400,000 450,000 soldiers killed over the last few years in Ukraine and shout out to the critical threats project on this one who does outstanding work the Russia team follows this quite closely of course Basically, they've broken down the math and calculated that Russia has suffered somewhere around 1,300 casualties for every square kilometer gained or infiltrated since June 2026. So just a few months ago. I mean, when you talk about unsustainable military losses, I can't possibly think of something that would be more unsustainable than that.

I mean, I will also throw in the caveat that i have been so surprised by how just how constantly willing moscow is to just throw more guys at this with the clear knowledge that there's so many of them are just going to come home in body bags and that hasn't ultimately shifted moscow's positioning on the war but you know, at this rate, this is just, just insane to me. Well, you're right. Insane is probably is the right word.

I mean, the casualties have only been increasing throughout the war and the Russian military has been, if it's not at the moment, moving slower in some areas than troops did in the stuck in the mud fronts of World War I. You know, the average soldier in you Ukraine today is hiding underground in the in the dirt in the bitter cold you know in a blundage or some other kind of for formation and there's death all around them they're desperately trying not to get spotted by drones as they move from cover to cover if they're Russian they're usually being told to assault the kill zone and sneak through, try and sneak through in small groups or as individuals to instigate sabotage in the back line we've just recently in the last couple of weeks we learned that russia and ukrainian soldiers are fighting in old unused natural gas pipelines underground now as a way to escape from the drones it is hell in every sense of the word and i think you're right evan when you say that it's the deadliest military conflict of the 21st century i mean in terms of a state to state war, certainly it seems absolutely it's just, it seems like a war of annihilation, doesn't it? And so I guess what I want to know is what is the ultimate cause of these figures for Russia's side?

Either of you can jump in here. Is it poor leadership, is it the inevitable consequence of this kind of war that changes so quickly technologically what's causing this on russia's side and could they be doing it differently yeah so there are a number of factors in play here just to go back to something you said about the kremlin not really knowing the full extent of the casualties that's all certainly true because one of the other things we've seen happen on the front lines is junior commanders are listing their dead who they know very well to be dead as missing and continuing to collect paychecks for a while. When when these people die, that eventually they have to go and list those people as dead because then, you know, if they don't do that, then they can't get reinforcements.

But they generally will skim off the top for a couple months once these people die. That kind of gets to one reason why all this is happening, which is to say the massive corruption and exploitation of the situation at the frontline level. I mean, we've seen so many reports at this point about Russian soldiers who are giving up their entire paychecks essentially to do slave labor for their commanders so that they're not sent into the front.

The idea that you can just be sent into this meat grinder at any point is obviously an incredible deterrent for people who do anything else to try and avoid that. At the same time, Russia as a military does not really tend to prioritize the well-being of its troops at all in any way. Rescue operations are almost minimal.

They really just, they're not a priority, especially for soldiers who are already wounded, who have seen marched back out onto the front in wheelchairs or crutches, so on and so forth. Really their job is to catch a bullet or two and to take a bullet or two out of Ukraine's overall reserves. Russia has really de-emphasized protection of human life, which is very contrary to Ukraine.

And we've seen this divergence of tactics where Ukraine now wants to preserve all of the manpower that it has because they're facing a much larger demographic crisis all sorts of things so they try to accelerate their use of drone warfare to whatever is possible we've recently seen entire assaults carried out using unmanned ground vehicles so recently there was one where this group of 28 ugbs took over a crop of land i think a couple of them were like where i grenade launchers a couple of them had heavy guns on them a couple of them were like suicide trucks basically just drive toward russian positions and blow up and completely unneeded assaults that claim large numbers of russian lives and on top of everything else winter is especially hard for ukraine on the home front because Ukraine relies on cephalized power and heating infrastructure to keep civilians alone. On the front lines, it's a very different scenario, where Russians' best bet to hide from drones is, as you say, to get underground, to borrow as far as they can, but also to secure that entrance using tree cover, using just natural foliage. It's late autumn and winter time now.

That foliage is gone. And for the next few months, as long as Ukraine can continue to operate its drones in the cold, those drones are going to have a very, very easy time tracking and hunting down Russian positions all across the front. So this is not going to get better for Russia in any kind of near term.

Well, and that's interesting, isn't it? Because like you say, if it's not going to get any easier for Russia in the short to medium term, these losses are simply unsustainable, aren't they? I mean, how much longer can Putin hold off on a mobilization after his election victory?

How much longer can the nation's finances take getting a battering from this war? That's a fairly open question for both of you. Do you think there could be a mobilization on the horizon or is there going to be some kind of inevitable crack in the Russian financial system now because we're just starting to see the first, the real cracks beginning to show such as deferment of payments to later for the military and things like that so what do you think yeah that's kind of the million-ruble question right now is will Russia order of full-scale mobilization which to be clear a mobilization is still happening it's not a society-wide formally announced general mobilization but absolutely, Russian recruiters are conducting forced recruitment regularly against the less wealthy provinces, against the eastern oblasts, places where really the wealthy Russian ethnic Russian elite is not going to miss a lot of these people, quite frankly.

But recently, we've seen those raids start to come into St. Petersburg and into Moscow. So, just this past weekend, in Moscow, there was this very large raid in one neighborhood in Moscow where a bunch of nightlife venues were raided. A couple hundred young people, some of them minors, some of them adults, were taken away to police stations where we have these accounts of Russian parents.

These were being shared on Telegram, coming up to the outside of the police station, being able to yell back and forth to their kids inside, where the kids were expressing, "We're being beaten. We're being tortured. We're not being allowed to use the bathroom, we're, you know, this, that, and the ones who are of fighting age, right, the ones who are adults, have been typically presented with one of two things.

Some of them kind of get contracts that they're forced to sign, others are served with draft orders. So, of course, that even young women are now being swept up in this. They're not going to the front, but potentially to be pressed into other kinds of backline service.

This is a real problem because for this entire war thus far, Putin and the Kremlin's main objective has been to offset the cost of the war to the russian people and specifically to the white wealthy ethnic russians who made up their racial support in moscow st petersburg you're right up until now the war has been targeting for a recruitment the ethnic minorities of russia right exactly and there have been plenty of ethnic russians who have happily signed up or have been enticed to do that via the really large sums that they can get for doing so. But the force of agreement efforts, which are what really matters, have mostly been targeting minorities. And now that doesn't seem to be the case.

Now, Putin desperately wants to avoid declaring anything public about this, because that might kind of be the thing that incentivizes all of these Russian civilians, especially parents of people who are going to watch their only sons being destructed and taken off to the front lines. That may be a trigger for a much larger display of public resistance, and they're trying to avoid that, but it's an open question of how much longer they can do that and so that there's something to be said about what's going on here in terms of the domestic Russian side right and Kyle do ordinary Russians understand the scale of these losses when they see 450,000 dead or if they've managed to get that number through somehow are they seeing it around them would Russians knowing the true death toll actually change anything either as well? That's an important question.

I'm interested to know what you think. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure that big scale like revelation here would be particularly influential domestically a lot. I mean, a lot of people in Russia know that their losses here are just staggering.

I mean, everybody knows people who have lost one, two, three or more sons in this conflict if you're in Russia. So it's sort of an unknown known, if you will. And given that Putin is not particularly willing to bend the knee when it comes to popularity on at least certain aspects of foreign policy, I have to imagine he's just continuing to go pedal to the metal here.

But at the same time there, I mean, I do also want to say like, the pedal to the metal mate doesn't mean he has to do this exact same thing he's been doing the whole time. So right now, despite the absolute bloodbath going on there seems to be some sort of a shift in strategy. So a lot of especially the, they have more jet powered drones at this point that Ukraine has struggled more to shoot down as well as with the situation that was going on with Starshield via Starlink and whatnot, being able to just pound Ukraine throughout the winter into what it thinks would be submission would be likely a more attractive option for putin that would be admittedly expensive but at the same time less expensive in terms of human life we will see i personally envision this being the path he will likely try to go down but of course there's simply no way out of the ground battles going on right now.

Great. That's very interesting to know. And I guess the last thing to then talk about, I guess you touched on it a little bit, Carl, there, is just what does this mean for Ukraine going forward?

Because the Ukrainians, you're right, Russia are going to continue trying to pound Ukraine over the winter to try and starve them out, freeze them out, as they've done every single winter pretty much since the war has begun Putin wants the Ukrainians to experience the war as if it's like weather, right. You know the seasons come and, you know, to see it as inevitable to see it as just the passing of, of something that's just going to always happen is the war and the death and everything like that to desensitize the Ukrainian population from continuing to resist. And surely that's going to seeing these kinds of numbers for the Ukrainian population is really going to give them a boost or would you disagree would you say sure 450 000 dead over a million wounded but russia's got 140 million people in it you know they're barely getting started here or would you say no this is going to give ukraine a good opportunity to sort of put a rod up its back even more so than it already is and continue to resist the invasion yeah we are deep down in war of attrition territory.

And I think that's the really important thing to understand here, because this is why the really brutal mitre-free Ukraine, the U.S. just signed a deal to advance the shipment of, I believe, 500 new Patriot missile interceptors. Those are not going to get there in time for winter. Russia does not have any concern about its ability to hit all of the ukrainian power and water infrastructure that lost as the weather starts turning the next couple weeks there have been a lot of reports that russia is stop piling its ballistic and cruise missiles to try and wipe out as much as possible before bringing it back to our prior discussion.

The new U.S. Congress comes in and there's going to be more political pressure to send interceptors to Ukraine as fast as possible. Russia really, really wants to hinder and huddle our modern infrastructure as much as it can before that but ukrainians the most recent pulling out of ukraine kind of reaffirms that the f3 is completely disinterested in to vigilante to russia right now certainly there are some elements there that would like the war to end and are willing to sacrifice part of it to do it then it's still a fairly rare position the resolve to hold out here is not really in question on the Ukraine side, there's a lot of discontent around the government, but there is definitely this brought up consensus of like, we need to deal with the Russian threat and then we'll deal with our internal problems. So numbers like this, they do kind of reaffirm this ticking clock on both sides where this war really has become about, can Russia destroy all of Ukraine's power and water infrastructure before Ukraine can kill enough Russians to make this war unsustainable?

It's not clear who's going to win that but it does seem like there is a pretty long countdown clock on the ukrainian side where capitulation remains very unlikely and these numbers kind of just reaffirmed that you know keep on doing what you're doing and you had a chance of getting where you need to get great well no sense of end in sight for the russians then on the front line mr putin the ball's in your court as it has been since february of 2022 all right then moving on now to the caribbean basket case that is haiti could things finally be starting to change for the better thanks to well little known a little el salvador of all countries kyle do you want to take the lead on this tell us about the situation in Haiti as it's been for the last couple of years oh boy do I so the situation in Haiti has been basically for all of my life, a various state of basket case. It has gotten significantly worse since the assassination of its former back in, I believe 2021. Yeah.

Jon Bonneau Moyes. Yes. I'm probably not saying that right.

But there you go. You were very close, Moise. But basically, since then, the country has spiraled into all sorts of complete anarchy.

So their interim leader, Ariel Henry, was essentially completely just running a fake government, to be honest. So gangs control significant amounts of the capital. And when I say significant, I don't mean like 30%.

I mean like between 70% and 90% of Port-au-Prince. So just complete the cut right down then yeah, it's it's essentially a post breakdown country at this point, which is why the current government was willing to be And part of this I do have to caveat is that they really don't have any option They do simply don't have the ability to resist El Salvador coming in at all that said I even if I do, I don't think they would because they this is basically a lifeline for them, even if it isn't going to actually really solidify the country. So we have seen it since El Salvador deployed into Haiti.

And this is because four Salvadoran soldiers who were part of an international anti-gang task force, which has not done anything, I will add got kidnapped they were four technicians I believe and they still have not been found but the El Salvador has deployed I believe 2,500 troops to the country although that may have gone up since I last wrote on this one. But moving more recently, I do have news that just on the other day, on November 8th, Salvadoran forces, alongside a Haitian police force, targeted the headquarters of the 400 Mawazo gang, which is one of the biggest ones in the country. His name is Wilson Joseph.

And this guy is really something special, because last week, or two weeks ago, he wrote to the United Nations asking for a negotiated settlement with El Salvador. And in so doing, by the way, he also warned that if El Salvador did not withdraw from the country, that there would be massive reprisals and indicated that Haitian civilians would be on the brunt of that one. So just to give you some context as to who this guy is, but ultimately El Salvador is pretty clear right now.

It's not backing down from this. And I think that it's, it's bitten off a much bigger battle than it had against its own gangs instance in South San Salvador and other cities there. But I think we're going to be in for a bit of a long haul here.

Interesting. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, and like you say, Haiti at the moment is just a total disaster.

It's just complete chaos. The gangs, their activities extend far beyond just drug trafficking and things like that. It's extortion.

It's kidnapping. It's sexual violence. It's massacres.

It's control of transport routes. It's everything you need to basically make life extraordinarily, apocalyptically dangerous for the Haitian citizens in the country. There's 6 million people in the country now facing food insecurity.

One and a half million have been displaced from their homes. This is, like you say, a total post-breakdown. We're well past breakdown.

Haiti isn't a failing state. It has failed. and so then from an unlikely source from this these four El Salvadoran technicians being kidnapped you have self-proclaimed coolest dictator ever Nayib Bukele of El Salvador who became internationally famous for crushing gangs in his own country, has now sent over thousands of soldiers into another country to fight its gangs. There's something to be said here.

Some people are calling this an invasion. Is this really an invasion? The Haitian government kind of asked for this assistance.

The UN aren't exactly going to be turning down the help. What is this? Is this just an incursion?

Is this limited? Yeah, I wouldn't really say invasion. We did run with the title of that over on Warfronts, and I think there's, you know, it's reasonable to use colloquially, but when we get into like the actual details of some of this the nitty gritty it's not like El Salvador has outright invaded the country talking about regime change or anything like that I mean the country is ostensibly El Salvador is there to recover its four missing technicians.

However, there is a big sense that there is a mission creep going on here big time because Bukele, at this point, having committed 2,500 plus soldiers, which, by the way, is roughly 10 percent of El Salvador's forces, They are not that big of an army. And they're not that big of a country to begin with. Having committed all of this, at this point, even if they find their four guys, hopefully alive, but if not otherwise as well, then I don't think Bukele just calls that a win and withdraws.

I think I mean, he's out he's out there saying some very intense things about he's going to have like total victory against these guys. I don't think he just backs down and goes in and just goes back home. You know, I think he's going to be there for quite some time.

And keep in mind, even before this current operation, he already had it was several hundred. It was potentially 200, maybe 300 forces inside Haiti to begin with as part of the international anti-gang force there. So I think it's certainly going to be a long stay okay all right because there's a question here of what is naib bukele actually trying to achieve sure he wants his guys back we get that 2,500 soldiers to get what a plus whatever was it whatever was in the country already plus special forces that's a it seems like a lot.

So I guess my question is, yeah, what is he really trying to achieve from this? And what does Bukele get out of this, basically? Is it just international acclaim, saying that I can solve regional problems?

I can be the strongman in this region? Evan, what do you think? Yeah, so there seems to be some kind of political advantage for Bekele here, at least that he's calculated.

The idea that he's going to go in now to this really opaque gang control territory and find his guys alive, I think is not likely at this stage unfortunately. These guys were captured without any raison d'etre, without any, really they were captured to leverage them as hostages kind of to force El Salvador and other countries to start backing down. Now that backfired big time, but the gangs don't really have much incentive to keep these guys alive and certainly not to allow them to be recaptured alive.

They are really the thing that the gangs can do now is inflict harm upon them. That's kind of the message to us all. Whether or not that'll work, I think, is also an open question.

But getting the guys back doesn't really seem to be the full purview of what Fichetti's going for anymore. Internationally, he has kind of been the model, as you already said, for this securitization, tough-on-prime push across Latin America. And for a while, he could benefit from the contrast with guys like Daniel Maboa in Ecuador who kind of tried the same tactics and didn't really see the same result if you kind of say oh well I'm just so into this I'm the best that there is there are a lot of reasons why it's it's tougher to do this in other places now it wasn't El Salvador that's a separate conversation But we're now at a point where we've seen Laura Fernandez in Costa Rica, we've seen Jose Antonio Kast in Chile, we've seen Kiko Fujimori in Peru.

A number of leaders come to power without fledging these kind of same crackdowns. on a political side and in salvador that kind of sets a ceiling on how long bukele can claim that this is really such a huge special thing for him as a guy who is looking to continue his term of office past salvador and troop limits all of that is to say he's kind of needed an act to for a little while to kind of maintain his internal image maintain its international image which el salvadorans you know enjoy the security that's coming they also enjoy kind of having this guy in charge who is really highly acclaimed around the continent you know everybody wants to shake hands with him everybody wants to do deals with him that's good for the Salvadoran people, and now we can provide an act two by exporting his gang control model to what is the most out of control gang crisis in the hemisphere right now in Haiti. It makes a lot of sense from where I'm listening to it. There's an interesting question though that arises from this, and Karl, I'm keen to hear what you think about this is how is this going to be different to the anti-gang deployment that we've we've seen so far in haiti that as you said has failed to basically do anything that was backed by kenya first and the un have taken it over can a military campaign like that actually fix things for haiti why would el salvador and bukele succeed where everyone else has failed yeah i mean that's sort of the big question here so on some level i'm not entirely convinced that they will succeed and part of this comes down to the very vague and shifting stuff in terms of their stated goals here.

So, again, they opened this salvo by focusing very specifically on they want their four guys back. If you give us your four, our four guys, Bukele himself on x said that if they give them the four guys back, then we'll leave. I don't think that's on the on the table anymore.

But I they he they haven't really committed to anything concrete either. So this can be seen as a, as a few different things. So first Bukele, just given how much of a basket case the country is, any amount of progress is inherently an improvement.

I mean, it's almost impossible to get worse from where it already is you know never say never but there's always worse that i get concerned when people do say things like that because as bad as it is in haiti people think they hit rock bottom and then they hear a knock from below let's try me out we always have to be careful with that one but in terms of moving forward here the sheer scale of the intervention from el salvador as well as the backing. It has United States backing, it has Colombian backing. So a lot of this is engaging the gangs more forcefully than the so-called anti-gang suppression force actually ever did.

So according to Ackland, clashes and drones targeting gangs increased almost 50 percent in the days following Salvadoran deployments compared to the previous three weeks. And, you know, this comes down to the effectiveness of some of the UN missions. Not to throw in a total sidebar here, but there's a mission similar to that in Lebanon called UNIFIL.

Its entire mission was to keep the south of Lebanon disarmed. The south of Lebanon is about as far from disarmed, at least prior to this war, as you could possibly imagine. I was going to say, a notoriously calm region of the world.

Exactly. A notoriously calm, quote unquote, region of Lebanon, which outside of the south is actually a relatively peaceful country to be in. But these gang suppression forces, they were doing some things, sure.

They had their areas that they would patrol in, and they would occasionally venture outside of them. But other than that, there wasn't a particular amount of engagement. Just how willing Bukele's guys are to go up against the gangs remains to be determined we'll have to see but initial indications are that they will be more active than the suppression force go on yeah just to chime in here before we move on because theory of the case seems to be right, that you can leverage like overwhelming force and create a very different result than the typical UN mission would encounter where the UN is really restrained and doesn't really want to go out and take many risks.

I was reading some testimony on the ground from Haitians this week talking about how Chad, which was the leading nation in terms of troop deployment on this new Gang suppression force after the Haiti mission kind of went away saying, you know, the chatty enforces Wouldn't get out of their own vehicles if they went into like a Disturbed zone or anywhere where there might be trouble, you know, the Salvadorans are on the ground guns out patrolling, you know ready to throw down El Salvador it hasn't had a ton of experience fighting foreign wars, but it did have its own civil war in the 90s, and it did deploy troops to Iraq during the war on Earth. The Salvadoran troops, there's not a ton of them, but they do have a very specific reputation. Like there are testimony from people who served with them in Iraq were talking about, you know, the time came to do close quarters ferry operations everybody's kind of like going through their unit tactics and getting ready to do those like buddy formation rooms for like things solid organs are getting out their knives and they're getting ready to like you know go toe-to-toe and like just clear rooms however they need to like they have a reputation i don't know how deserved it is now in the 20th place, considering, you know, there's always attrition over time.

But they do certainly have a reputation of, like, these guys, once they go in and you take them off the leash, they are going to achieve really substantial results. Now, can you really actually do that given the threat they can pose that's the open question but it seems like that is his core argument is like no if you if you do what we did in El Salvador and you say hey forget the international standards deal with the problem however you need to then you'll achieve results and we'll have to see whether or not that happens well I guess the question would be in Haiti is what standards right but I think there's what's worth saying here especially with this is this kind of thing can be as Carl mentioned this can be kind of a sticky these kinds of conflicts because I mean, the U S saw it in Afghanistan, you know, you thought you know, the U S thought they could go in clear out Al Qaeda and they were still there 20 years later after invading. So I guess my question is could El Salvador get drawn into a forever war here?

And if it does, you know, what, what are they going to do because if they're working on the basis of we want our guys back you might lose a lot more guys before you fully get rid of the gang so it creates almost no indication of knowing when exactly el salvador will be going home if they'll be going home. Yeah, I mean, I think that's like a massive vulnerability for Bukele here. And that is really how we get into situations where this can sort of escalate.

To be honest, so far there have been a total of zero confirmed Salvadoran fatalities. I think there may have been a few minor injuries but i think it was a total of four of them unrelated to the original four who are missing but overall it's been extremely lopsided so i'm i'm not entirely surprised by that. But there is there are aspects of this conflict that do spell disaster potentially for me.

So Port-au-Prince in particular has been, it's basically like a maze there's just like all these tiny passageways where things were just like built on top of other things buildings on top of buildings on top of buildings that leave these narrow passageways and it's their streets a lot are not named a lot of the streets are very ambiguous this is like gold standard maze territory for fighting like urban warfare for the defenders which would be the gangs el salvador doesn't even speak the language so i mean this they let alone know the intricacies of all the little ins and outs of the city so this would be very difficult for them if they get drawn into urban conflict to be honest most of it has not been that so far and i think that if bukele plays his cards right he might be able to avoid the worst of it but as we said earlier never say never so he's he's certainly risking it he i will say that at least. Yeah, very much so, and as we say, it's the best laid plans of mice and men, as it were when it comes to military conflict, and much like Donald Rumsfeld once said, you go to war with the army you have, and that doesn't always get the job done so i think that's that's it from us that's all folks thank you for listening to us ramble on today you have been listening to on the fronts it's goodbye from me evan and kyle see you next time
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