The Delegates Lounge

A Canadian Officer Resigns to Join Belarusians Fighting for Ukraine, Part 1

• The Delegates Lounge LLC • Season 1 • Episode 8

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Discover why the traditional military doctrines are being upended as we engage with Dave Smith, a former major in the Canadian Armed Forces who made the extraordinary leap to volunteer as a fighter in Ukraine. Listen to Dave's compelling narrative about leaving a secure military career to join the Kastuś Kalinoŭski Regiment, a unit of Belarusian Partisans opposing Alexandr Lukashenko and fighting to defend Ukraine against the Russian invasion.

J. Alex Tarquinio and Frank Radford, our hosts in The Delegates Lounge, spoke from New York, while Dave spoke from Ukraine via web conference. This is Part 1 of our conversation, which began in July with Dave's account of his journey and his insights into the war up until that point. He was about to go on a major operation. Tune in next week for Part 2. We followed up with Dave as he was ending his latest rotation on Ukraine's Eastern Front in October. As he relates his battlefield experiences, listeners will catch a rare glimpse into how international policies directly impact those on the front lines.

References: 

Dave Smith co-authored the following article in Real Clear Defense with Julian Spencer-Churchill:

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/07/03/a_view_from_the_trenchline_1041979.html

Dave’s recent articles in Merion West:

https://merionwest.com/2024/08/29/a-portrait-of-a-stubborn-ukrainian/

https://merionwest.com/2024/10/06/the-origins-of-a-partisan/

Dave joined the Kastuś Kalinoŭski Regiment of Belarusian volunteers fighting in support of Ukraine.

https://kalinouski.org/en/

Dave mentioned the “Leeroy Jenkins” battle cry from this video game meme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLyOj_QD4a4

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Welcome to the Delegates Lounge. Pull up a chair. I'm Alex Tarquinio, a journalist based at the United Nations here in New York City and your emcee for this podcast featuring some of the most influential minds in the world today. Settle in for some riveting tete-a-tete, available wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome back.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Today we're introducing you to a Canadian volunteer on the Ukrainian battle lines. Dave Smith walked away from his career with the Canadian Armed Forces to become a volunteer fighter with the Kalinowski Regiment. Many of these fighters won't speak with the press over concerns about the potential persecution of their families in Belarus. Even before Russia's full scale invasion of their neighboring country, many of them were already opponents of Alexander Lukashenko, who they believe had lost the 2020 presidential election in their country. To Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. As an aside, we interviewed a this summer at NATO's Washington Summit, so look for that episode in our playlist.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Dave's story is so compelling that we're bringing it to you in two parts. In this episode, you'll hear our interview with him in July, when he had just returned to Ukraine and right before heading back into battle. We hope you'll come back to listen to part two. We followed up with Dave in October when he delved into anecdotes from the battlefield For both conversations. Frank and I spoke with Dave, who joined us from Ukraine via web conference. Frank, do you want to tell us how you met Dave?

Frank Radford:

Yeah, you bet. I got in touch with Dave through Julian Spencer Churchill, a professor at Canada's Concordia University, after meeting Dave in a Zoom meeting. Dave is a classic unassuming soul, one of those who, of their own volition, chooses to take up arms against a sea of troubles and to oppose them by deliberately going into harm's way. To take up arms against a sea of troubles and to oppose them by deliberately going into harm's way. Knowing full well the dangers that await him, he was disgusted by what he saw as the ineffectual response to Russia's aggression against Ukraine. Dave made the hard choice to resign from his rank as Major after 15 years on a fast-track career path in the Canadian Armed Forces. He chose the Belarusian Regiment, where like-minded volunteers understood the danger posed by Russia, not just to Ukraine but to everyone that's free and wants to remain that way.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

We'll include a link in the show notes to an article in Real Clear Defence that Dave co-authored with Julian Spencer Churchill. We didn't want to interrupt the flow of conversation with Dave to explain military terminology. So, frank, can you help us decipher the jargon? For instance, in the first minute Dave refers to leaving the CAF.

Frank Radford:

The CAF is the Canadian Armed Forces.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Okay, he also refers to a recce team.

Frank Radford:

That's reconnaissance.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

And what are cam nets?

Frank Radford:

Cam nets are camouflage nets.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

What's the size of a battalion? How many soldiers are in one?

Frank Radford:

I would say anything from four to six hundred.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

And how would you explain to a civilian what military doctrine is? And how would an army adapt it?

Frank Radford:

Doctrine is the method of war that is practiced by an army, so it's based on current threats. If you're not to be caught on the battlefield and completely outclassed by a different technology or a different modus operandi of the other side, you need to have a doctrine that is flexible and constantly being upgraded. It's, like you know, a software.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Okay. Well, you guys had quite an interesting discussion about drones. Explain the difference between MQ-9s and FPVs.

Frank Radford:

Sure can. Yeah, dave was making a point. It's a question of bang for the buck. The MQ-9 Reaper, as it's called at the moment, is a high-altitude remotely piloted drone. It carries state-of-the-art ordnance, electronic warfare and surveillance suites. It needs a dedicated pilot. Now it can be flown a continent away, but can also get shot down by just about anything hooties or the backdraft of a MiG-29. Contrast that drone with the FPV, the first person viewer, which is what you see on the front lines of Ukraine, generally a quadcopter which has four rotary blades enabling it to land and take off vertically, which means it can be placed right next to the line of engagement, better known as a zero line. But, more importantly, it can be flown by a Gen Z who's played video games. So what's the difference? The cost An MQ-9 is $30 million plus An FPV can be anything from $500 to maybe a couple of thousand, and clearly a game changer in modern warfare.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

You and Dave spoke and he understood immediately when you asked him about the Glorious Revolution. For our listeners who are not conversant in 17th century English history, maybe you could explain why you thought the Glorious Revolution was a good analogy.

Frank Radford:

Well, back in 1688, the then King of England, King James II, was a Catholic king, and a stubborn one at that. His subjects were Protestant, and when William of Orange landed in the southwest of England and he was a Protestant rival, then there was the prospect of civil war, but and this is what makes this the glorious revolution James II opted to leave. Now, when Sviatlana spoke to us, she made it clear that she desired for Belarus a peaceful transition. So the analogy is that if Lukashenko could be induced to shuffle off to Russia, then Belarus could celebrate a glorious revolution of their own.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Now, my personal favorite was Dave's creative use of Leeroy Jenkins from the world of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, may be familiar to some of our listeners, but not all. Urban Dictionary defines pulling a Leeroy Jenkins as destroying all hope of success by rushing into battle without following strategy, and it stems from an incident when a player used his character name as a battle cry. Oh my god, he just ran in. And on that note, let's get started. Dave Smith, thanks for joining us in the Delegates Lounge and thanks for making time for us from eastern Ukraine. Perhaps you could start by explaining how you became a volunteer fighter for Ukraine and, within that, how you, as a Canadian, began working with a Belarusian unit of volunteers.

Dave Smith:

Yeah, I was an infantry officer in the Canadian Army for 15 years. I joined in 2008 after I finished university, and then 2022, after the full-scale invasion started I was deployed to Europe. I was embedded in a USS task force headquarters assisting the Ukrainians. When they announced the Legion on February 27th 2022, I went into work the next day and told my boss like I'm quitting, I'm leaving the CAF, I'm going to join the Legion. And my boss was like hang on, hang on. Like we're sending a recce team to Europe to find out what the Americans are doing. We're going to get you over there with the 18 Airborne Corps. And you know it was good it was. You know I'm glad I did it. It was a very important professional experience for me. But when I came home in November, I went into my colonel's office the next day and said I won't be here next spring when the counteroffensive starts. Don't expect me to be here in a cubicle with you guys. I will be with the Ukrainians fighting the fight. You'll all be here reading more articles and writing briefing notes about what the Ukrainians are doing.

Dave Smith:

Everybody thought I was insane insane. Two of my best friends had an intervention with me. My boss pulled me into his office probably five times to talk me out of it, but I I knew like I could. I could tell the magnitude of what was going on. Like this wasn't just russia versus the west, this was the free world versus the unfree world. The writings were already on the wall. The international community sucks. There's no other way to put it. They had no idea what they're doing and Canada was the worst offender in my opinion. So when I came home from that deployment I got home in November of 2022. I did Christmas leave and then I went in after that and just submitted my resignation and I just bought a bunch of gear, flew to Ukraine and joined the Legion.

Dave Smith:

How I came to be in the Belarusian regiment is unusual. Like most Westerners that come here join in one of the international squadrons. So I won't get into like the legion is organized because it's constantly changing, but there's several different units in the international legion. There's a couple that are like straight up mishmash Westerner units, which are mostly former NATO soldiers, and then there's the Georgians have a unit, there's a Russian unit and there's a Belarusian unit. So when I got here and then sorry, and then there's also like the Ukrainian brigades will also hire foreigners on like an individual basis or a team basis. So it's not like you get here and there's one monolithic entity that you're joining. You kind of have to find the right fit.

Dave Smith:

So when I heard there was a Belarusian unit, I was super excited to meet them because of the job. I used to have my last job before I left. I was a targeting officer on eastern europe portfolio, specifically looking at the russian threat. I was super cognizant of what was going on in 2020 when Sviatlana ended up winning the presidency because Lukashenko didn't think a woman could beat him, and I knew most of the dudes in the regiment were defectors, right. There were people that either escaped Belarus legitimately or escaped prison and then escaped belarus, um. So psychologically I felt most aligned with them because they're all true believers, right.

Dave Smith:

So I hate to say this, but the legion, especially in the early days, you know, the first six months of the war it attracted all kinds of types that you think will fight in foreign wars uh, more mercenary mentality guys. And when I met the Belarusians, it was a meeting of the minds, if you will. You know they like they. They understood that the war in ukraine is part of a broader um strategic shift that's going on in Eastern Europe, and I honestly do think that if the West had realized in the middle of the pandemic how important that Belarusian election was in 2020 and supported Sviatlana's government, I don't think we would have had the invasion of Ukraine right, for multiple reasons.

Dave Smith:

Number one I think that just the show of solidarity behind a country that wants to be a liberal democracy would have frightened the tyrants. But number two is, militarily, putin was reliant on Belarusian territory to get into Ukraine, to pre-positioned forces in belarus in april of 2021 and have that huge build-up. So strategically, militarily and psychologically, I felt that it was the unit that I should be part of and I also just, you know, really dug their soldiers mentality you know what I mean like the average worked in it or some other kind of white collar job came to ukraine and they learned to fight war at war with the russian army. You know that, like, those are hard dudes, you know, and they can't go home, which is the big difference between them and all the other foreign fighters. Everyone else can leave, right, they don't have a home to go home to. So that brings a lot more stability to the organization. That's why I, you know, I left and went on leave over Christmas last year and when I came back I rejoined.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

And, to be clear, you don't have I mean, I know you're Canadian, but you don't have a Belarusian family connection.

Dave Smith:

Nor Ukrainian.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Because when we did speak with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya recently, she had mentioned that she can't say too much about the guys in the Belarusian regiment because some of them may still have family in Belarus and there could be re..

Frank Radford:

Not may most of them do. A lot of them have already been targeted. Like several of them they're you know they can't contact their families because they're. The Belarusian KGB knows that they're here.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

So the reason you're able to speak with us today is because you're with the regiment, but you're not Belarusian. You don't have family at peril in Belarus.

Dave Smith:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Frank Radford:

Well, Dave, I've got some specific questions. Do you see a lot more volunteers coming over, or is it sort of passe?

Dave Smith:

No, I would say it's stabilized. I would say in the last six to eight months we're seeing a steady inflow, but it's small comparatively. It's me and the only guys that I, the only former officers that I know, have all been here longer than me, um, so they're just in it for the long haul, they're in it to win it, um, but there's like dude, we could have a bi-weekly potluck. There's so few of us if we wanted to. The problem ukraine has with the foreign fighters and I don't think it's a problem you can fix is that organizationally it will always be unstable because every foreigner is one bad day away from just throwing the rifle down and going home. So it's very hard to plan right. It's very hard to like. You won't know what's your unit strength six months from now. You have no idea right.

Frank Radford:

The exponential growth of drones towards possibly autonomous weapon systems must be impacting. Just by observation of what's going on, how on earth do you actually do a doctrinal change that can deal with that?

Dave Smith:

Frank, you are hitting the exact problem that me and my unit are at right now. Infantry are obsolete right now, like thermal drones, glide bombs and FPVs, like we can't go anywhere, we can't start an assault, we can't hold a piece of terrain, we can't do anything, a piece of trade, we can't do anything, because the moment we show up, an fpv just kills us, you know. And that problem is not going to be solved by us, like it doesn't matter how good our cam nets are, it doesn't matter how good our, you know, radio discipline is, we're not going to fix that problem. It you need an operational level commander with a plan and the technology to back up that plan to solve that problem, and I firmly believe the Ukrainians will solve it before the RAND Corporation or any R&D agency.

Frank Radford:

But the issue is will the Russians solve it faster?

Dave Smith:

The you I think,.. we attribute undefined a bit too much intelligence to the Russians. Like, like they, they like they are learning, they're adapting, they're better.

Dave Smith:

definitely better than they were were six months ago, a year ago, two years ago, but I think they get better at a cost of bodies. That is like just unacceptable. Like you won't win if. If every lesson learned takes that many casualties, you won't win. They also don't innovate the steel right. Like they don't learn. They learn what the ukrainians Ukrainians are doing. You know the Ukrainians do it to them. They figure it out right. The Ukrainians are actually innovators, and I know because I see it like they show up and they're like we have this new drone, we want to go test it with you. You watch them, you're like you guys are amazing, right. And then six months later, the Russians have it too right, because they reverse engineer what the Ukrainians are doing. So if this were, you know, a capitalist free market, russia is the cheap knockoff of an Apple product like Steve Jobs will innovate, everyone else will copy him, you know, and it's like yes, will you get the product cheaper?

Frank Radford:

but nevertheless there's a gap between you know. Obviously the Ukrainians are at the the forefront and the Russians are six months behind them or less, but where's nato?

Dave Smith:

No, NATO's in the Stone Age NATO. It doesn't matter how much evidence you produce that like guys, stop building strategic theater-level drones. Like MQ-9s are stupid. Stop building them, because as soon as you build it, you're afraid you'll lose it, so you never use it you know what. I mean, no matter how much you try to tell defense industrial complex, it's like build small, cheap, disposable right now. They won't do it. They're in the Stone Age.

Frank Radford:

The IDF and I think NATO in particular, are flummoxed by the prospect of being swarmed by FPVs, and the question is whether or not Russia can adapt faster than they can create a doctrine to deal with it.

Dave Smith:

I'm positive in terms of like the way they're using thermal guns right now. Nato won't figure it out until a bunch of people get killed, until they actually go to a flight and an entire battalion gets wiped out in one day by FPVs. Nato won't figure it out. You can send all the lessons learned people you want to Ukraine. The RAND Corporation can write papers, it won't matter. Until a battalion of dudes gets killed in three hours by fpvs, they won't figure it out. Europe still doesn't get it. You know, I mean the european. I mean there's Kaja Kallas in Estonia. Uh, is my hero. I wish she was in charge of everything.

Dave Smith:

Kaja Kallas in Estonia. She gets it, and I think the Estonians get it, the Poles get it. Emmanuel Macron, who is the only major European leader in my opinion, was trying to act like a leader in the last year. So you're going to see by the end of this decade, in Dave Smith's opinion, like the, the unfree world that has nuclear weapons is just going to divide the world up the way they want it, and the rest of us are just going to have to accept it because we refuse to do anything about it. And I mean honestly, I've been like calling out dictators for years. I'm offended that Wagner imploded before they put me on their kill list, you know. I mean, I don't know what more I have to do. Uh, putin has never tried to honeypot me or even novichok my tea, and I've been calling him out on the dark web for a decade

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Now how would you call him out on the Dark Web? That's very interesting. Was it certain channels you were on?

Dave Smith:

Well, there was a short time when I was in cyber I made it a personal vendetta to go after these Russian. I call them cyber privateers. Like we pretend they're just criminals that are ransom wearing hospitals and whatnot, but really what they are is they're building strategic weapons for the Russian government, the FSB government, the FSB, and we all just kind of pretend they're like teenagers in their mom's basements that are ransom wearing pipelines in the Eastern US, and really what they are is they're privateers. Right, like Putin has an unwritten agreement with them where he says okay, listen, don't come after me, don't come after the oligarchs, whatever you do to America is free game.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

So was this to? To be clear, this is when you were with the canadian military it was in military cyber for a very short period.

Dave Smith:

I like, like I said, I'm an infantry officer. I came home from deployment in 2019. Cyber needed an operations officer, which is a role that I was qualified for, and I volunteered for it and I just ended up kind of planning uh missions with ukraine, essentially, um, because at the time, we had this huge training this was going on with ukrainians to try and help them get more postured to be a nato country, and in 2016, nato had published this huge report with I like 150 some recommendations for how the Ukrainian military could become more suitable for NATO membership. And there was a lot of this stuff that they were doing themselves right, like just typical stuff infantry training or small unit tactics or, you know, upgrading weapons systems, things like that but then there was a bunch of stuff they had no idea how to do, which included being more cyber secure right. So they were literally looking for countries to show them how to harden their networks and lock out Russian intrusions.

Dave Smith:

That's how I ended up working while I was in the Canadian military. I was back in Canada with cyber, so that was how I had been on the Russian file already, but that was really how I started working directly with Ukraine. So by the time the invasion started, you know my team back at the operational command we were like some of the few people that were telling everybody this invasion is definitely going to happen. Me and my band of nerds, we were like the few half dozen people that were standing in front of the generals being like no sir, they're definitely going to invade, like they're moving blood bags to the front. Wake up.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Do you think part of it was the attention was elsewhere because of the global pandemic?

Dave Smith:

No, I think that Western leaders believe what they want to believe, like they honestly think that everyone is rational the way they are. They like they don't even to this day right. Like there's still people that think you know, putin's just an irrational actor. Like I can't tell you the number of articles I read. It's like putin's just clearly not a rational actor. It's like no, you just mistakenly think that the way you think is the only way to be rational.

Frank Radford:

Now, especially from a former NATO officer's point of view, we don't understand the pecking order in their command structure, In other words, FSB dictates and then the military you know undertakes, Whereas that's certainly not the case in NATO militaries.

Dave Smith:

Okay. So you're bringing up a great point. You're bringing up something that's a hobby horse for me or a bugbear, I don't know what you call it, but I don't have any visibility on the inner workings of the Ukrainian command structure, the general staff, the security service, like I, like I'm literally just last night I was a dude walking around in the woods, um, you know, hoping I had enough water, right, so I don't want to make it seem like I have access to information that I don't have. I say here's one thing I've identified culturally that is very different between the post-Soviet sphere and the NATO countries. In the military that I come from, the military culture that I was raised in, we kind of idolize special forces units, SOF units, the Seal Teams, the Rangers, SAS. You know, in Canada we have the JTF2 and CSOR.

Dave Smith:

In the post-Soviet world it's all intelligence, right, they're elite units, they're all intelligence organizations, uh, whether it's military or security services and that's true in ukraine as well. Like you can spot them on the battlefield when you see the guys with really cool gear and tricked out vehicles and such, it's either UR, SBU or some other intelligence outfit. So there's a relationship between FSB and the regular military that NATO doesn't understand. But it's not the same as, like the way the CIA, the US military works right, or the way CSIS and the Canadian military work. We have these very sharp policy and legal boundaries between what militaries do versus what intelligence agencies do. Intelligence agencies like intelligence, you know. For them to become an action arm that delivers effects, especially on a battlefield, is extremely difficult. Like policy-wise, I've worked with the US military and government. The three-letter agencies are around, but anytime you go to a meeting with them, there's a policy advisor and a legal advisor sitting right next to whoever the decision maker is saying you know, sir, an intelligence agency can't do that, or sir that's collecting on US citizens, or sir you can't. Or, ma'am, you know, like no, no, no, no, no, like the boundary between intelligence, what the intelligence agency does and what the military does, is very palpable, and I think that's true of all NATO countries, although I can't speak from firsthand experience. That is not the case here. From intelligence to decision maker to action arm, that chain, if you will, is much faster and stronger and more reactive in Ukraine and Russia than it is in any NATO country.

Dave Smith:

I'm not saying it works all the time. I think if you look at the first six weeks of the war, it was clear there was no military people in charge. You know, like if I was a general advising Putin, you know I'd say, sir, we've spent eight years in the east spreading this narrative that there are Russian speakers and ethnic Russians in Donbass who are being genocided by Nazis. That's the military objective. Is the East, it's Donbass, right. It's not to Leeroy Jenkins at the Kyiv. You know like, that's not. Like any military planner would say this is insane, this is ludicrous. Only intelligence spooks could think that was a good idea.

Frank Radford:

The way the war unfolded in the Southern theater, especially taking, you know, the Isthmus, and then going in and taking Mariupol and Berdyansk and then Kherson.

Dave Smith:

We've never been in the South right, so all the foreigners we're essentially light infantry. Everything going down in Kherson, Mariupol and even most of Zaporizhia is all mechanized warfare that we're not part of. You know what I mean, so I haven't spent considerable time in the portion of the theater that you're talking about.

Frank Radford:

They got close to Odessa. If you take Odessa, it's over.

Dave Smith:

They got close geographically. They did not get close feasibility-wise as you would think looking at the map.

Frank Radford:

The instead focused on Kyiv, which was ludicrous from a military point of view. Had they diverted force where they were successful?

Dave Smith:

The first five, six weeks of the war, I do not believe there was any military people in charge, and you'll notice when the credit to the Russians were credits due after those first six weeks and the 65- kilometer convoy of shame that got blown up across the country. When they pulled back to the east, they had a lot of success April-ish April, June of 2022, when they pulled back to the east.

Dave Smith:

That's when they started making ground towards Odessa along the coast. It wasn't in the opening days, right, it was like two months into. It is when they really started to make gains and when they really really started to take the east right. Because, if you think about it this way, the opening days of the war, they have 13 axes of advance going towards all parts of the country Poltava, Odessa. Right, it was not Ukrainian crack units fighting in Bucha, you know, it was reservists and it was guerrillas and it was people that were handed an AK-47 on February 25th. The good units were still fighting in the east.

Dave Smith:

So if you look at Donbass in March, April, June, you see this shift where it's like, well, the Russians weren't really in control of anything, to by the middle of the summer, where it was like they're in control of territory they did not have on February 24th and they're making an end run to Odessa and it's looking quite successful. So I believe what happened was after the first six years of the war, Putin realized like these intelligence spooks don't know what the hell they're doing and I'm putting the general staff back in charge, and that included the Prigozhin. And then eventually it was the Kherson fight with Surovikin and Surovikin, you know, was actually a decent commander and then Prigozhin and Wagner, who is like terrifying to fight like. I can tell you, Wagner, they're evil and they're barbaric. They knew what they were doing. They destroyed themselves taking Bakhmut. They knew how to fight. So whenever the Russian military forces, in my opinion, were making the decisions, they've had considerable success, at least in the first year, year and a half of the war.

Dave Smith:

I think it's when they were letting the intelligence, people like Putin, you know, when they were letting people like Putin make military decisions, I think the battlefield was turning against them and this idea that you can use information, warfare and assassinations to make battlefield victories, I think is mistaken. And it's definitely mistaken when you're fighting another post-Soviet military right, because the Ukrainians know that game the Ukrainian SSO, which is their special forces. They trained the stay-behinds that stayed in the occupied territories between about 2015 and 2022. If you think it was just Ukrainian national identity that suddenly rose up in February and that's why these old ladies were yelling at Russian soldiers in the street corner, I hate to break it to you. That was the Ukrainian special forces training citizens to plant car bombs and assassinate people. The Ukrainians are extremely good at that stuff, and it's a whole world that NATO militaries. We know nothing about.

Frank Radford:

I don't think that's appreciated the extent of that. No, I don't think so either. It's very SOE, very French resistance Totally.

Dave Smith:

Yeah, resistance like we throw it around, you know what I mean, but here it's real, like when you meet them, you know these farmers in these occupied territories and I think it's why the Russians thought they had the monopoly on that game, not realizing Ukrainians are from the same military and intelligence heritage, so it's reciprocal.

Dave Smith:

You know, like they know how to do it too, you know?

Frank Radford:

Okay, let's just quickly talk about your experiences with the Ukrainian forces operational level at the division.

Dave Smith:

I couldn't tell you I'm not at the operational level. Like I'm way down in the weeds at the tactical level. But I will say I've never seen anything larger than a company level op conducted here. Now I have a very narrow experience.

Dave Smith:

I'm light infantry.

Frank Radford:

Now, how many officers of your rank formerly in NATO are serving, as I mean you say you're basically on the front line as almost a grunt right.

Dave Smith:

There's probably a handful, if that there was a handful when I got here. There's me and one other guy that I know of right now left so

Frank Radford:

what you have to say is is is worthy of note.

Dave Smith:

Yeah. The other thing that I say is that it because the Ukrainians are actually fighting a conventional war that we haven't seen anybody else fight in decades. It's really easy to look at them and say like, oh my god, they don't understand the operational level of war right I can tell you from firsthand experience Canada don't understand the operational level of war right.

Dave Smith:

I can tell you from firsthand experience Canada doesn't understand the operational level of war. We're retarded at it, we suck. I was at the operational level of command, right. You guys call them COCOMs, we just call it the Joint Operational Command. You know, other than, like your well-oiled machine militaries, which at this point would probably only be the US, I don't know anybody that's good at the operational level of war and I know that whenever I was on deployments in the past with Brits and Australians, all we did was complain about how no one knew what the hell the point of an operational headquarters was, of an operational headquarters was. You know, like I, like me and several, if you ever want to strike up a conversation with a British, you know, mid-level officer, like a major lieutenant colonel type, just walk into a bar, buy him a beer and say don't you hate the operational level of war.

Dave Smith:

And you, they'll just bitch all night. So it's really easy to point at the Ukrainians and be like well, they have a general staff and they have brigade commanders and they have nothing in between because they don't understand the operational level of war. Well, I put it to you like, show me someone who does Other than Team America.

Frank Radford:

NATO just says that China is the decisive enabler of Russia. You're on the battlefield. Are you noticing any significant changes because of Chinese equipment?

Dave Smith:

I couldn't really say I don't like. I haven't ripped apart any wreckage of missiles and seen if there's chinese parts of them. I found the language of decisive enabler very questionable. I I'm sure they're an enable, you know. I'm sure china is happily supporting russia in all the ways that it thinks it can, without getting itself into too much trouble. Decisive though I think. If Xi J inping was like Vlad bro, we're not giving you any computer chips or missile equipment or thermals or anything, I don't think that would stop the war right. I don't think putin would be like oh darn, China's not on board anymore, so we're going to have to go home. Whatever support China's giving, I'm sure it's bad, but I don't think it's decisive.

Frank Radford:

Well, that's fair enough. You're on the front line. So I mean, obviously they've got motorcycles and these golf cart things and they're not hardly decisive yeah.

Frank Radford:

They're not hardly decisive.

Dave Smith:

Yeah, I also think the West is quick to see Chinese writing on military technology in Eastern Ukraine as a sign of China supporting Russia, and I just I think that's misinterpreting the widespread availability of Chinese technology. We buy from China. I guarantee it, like if I could go on Amazon right now and buy drones for my whole unit that were made in China, we would do it. You know what I mean. That doesn't mean China is suddenly supporting the Belarusian regiment in eastern Ukraine. It means Chinese technology is very easy to get.

Frank Radford:

They were over there doing an exercise with the Belarusians at the same time NATO conference.

Dave Smith:

I think there's two things that are important to remember. Totalitarian regimes never trust each other. They can't so anytime you see them working together. It's a marriage of convenience, and I think it's a mistake to over-interpret their cooperation. If Xi Jinping thought it would be politically advantageous to him to undermine Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, he would do it, you know. And the second thing is, if you imagine the free world and the unfree world and there's a line down the middle between the two of them, there's a box right in the middle of that line with three compartments in it. The three compartments are the Black Sea, Ukraine and Belarus. Right, the unfree world needs those three compartments to get into Europe. Right, the war path to Europe is through Belarus or through Ukraine, or through the Black Sea. Right now it's one of the unsung stories of the war there's an entire naval war going on in the Black Sea that isn't even making it to the cover of the New York Times because the Ukrainians are winning it so decisively.

Dave Smith:

Ukraine is the compartment that's contested. Belarus is held by Russia. The Belarusians that I work with, they all say Belarus is not a country, it's occupied territory. It's the equivalent of occupied Kherson or occupied Donetsk or Luhansk. The tyrants need Belarus. Putin couldn't have launched his war in Ukraine without Belarus. They can't credibly maintain their threat to NATO countries without Belarus. They can't maintain they can't credibly maintain their threat to NATO countries without Belarus. If Belarus were to get flipped and become, you know, an EU member or a NATO-friendly democratic country, that would be a huge blow for Putin and Xi Jinping.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Is that getting back to your Belarusian colleagues there in the regiment? Is that how the majority of them see it?

Dave Smith:

For them, it's a lot more local right. For me, I live in this geostrategic world. For them, it's about their families in Brest and Minsk and whatnot. A lot of them I think I don't want to say have given up hope on Belarus, but they know they're in this for a long time. Like this is the difference between talking to a Belarusian soldier here and your average Westerner that comes here for three months or six months or whatever. Um, they know they are in this war for a long time, and when I say a long time, I mean like generational. Several of them are trying to get Ukrainian citizenship and buy houses here and get married. They know like there's no point pretending that they're going home anytime soon. So the the biggest difference, I would say, between them and your average foreign fighter is like, even if they win in Ukraine, they're like this isn't over. You know. They're like freedom has not come to Eastern Europe yet.

Dave Smith:

I don't want to say they're hopeless, but their psychology is much more the long game. Their repression apparatus has escalated through the roof. I can't tell you how many dudes I know here that were in prison after the 2020 elections, tortured. Um people disappear in the night like it's the soviet union again families being intimidated, uh, routinely and systematically, uh, so that's a huge difference is what's happened since 2020. And the number two the war has the regime in a really sticky situation. You, you know what I mean. Like they don't want to over-support Russia, but they know they can't under-support Russia because now the Russian army is fully mobilized. They're on a wartime economy. If Vlad wants to roll the tanks across the border into Belarus, for whatever objective, he could do it. So they have to worry about that in a way that I don't think they had to worry about it five years ago.

Frank Radford:

To go all historical, if you look at 1688 and the Glorious Revolution, you have James II, who was a Catholic, but everybody else is Protestant, but the catalyst was William of Orange. Now is it feasible to see the Belarusian regiment or volunteer corps as that sort of lingering threat?

Dave Smith:

They would be the ones to go back and lead the color revolution in the wings. The threat of them is important. You need Lukashenko to wake up. When he looks outside his palace and he sees a bunch of 25 year old women waving the non-official flag, he needs to worry. If I send in the police to break up that protest, will they actually do it? And if they do try to do it, will a bunch of freedom fighters roar up on pickup trucks? And you need that fear in his brain, otherwise your revolution will not succeed.

Dave Smith:

If you study revolutions, you know and I'm sure um you'll have listeners that are smarter on this than I am. But if you look at revolutions me as a military person I can tell you there's two sides to it. Right and in unconventional warfare, we talk about left of bang, and right of bang. Bang is like when does it go violent? So if you imagine, you know, at the start of the revolutionary movement, right, you have the populace's ability to wage violence on the regime and you have the regime's ability to wage violence on the populace, and what you're trying to do, left of bang, equalize those as much as possible. So you're trying to do left of bang is equalize those as much as possible. So you're trying to deteriorate the security services. You're trying to deteriorate the police forces. You're trying to make the military members question their loyalty to the regime, because what you want to do is get it to the point where the leaders of the regime are actually afraid that if they order crowd control officers to go beat protesters, they want the regime to be thinking they might not listen. And the best example I can think of that's contemporary, is like Prigoz thought he had tipped the balance right when he set off from Rostov to go towards Moscow.

Dave Smith:

He thought all of the checkpoints were going to open up, right. He thought all of the police services and the military were going to support him on his march. And he was right to a degree. Like when he went into Rostov, they're all waving flags and taking selfies with them and they're all super happy. Wagner was there. But then as he started to go down the highway, it became harder and harder to get through the checkpoints because he had not deteriorated the security services.

Frank Radford:

Well, what's the wish list for your Belarusian compatriots? What would they like to see?

Dave Smith:

The thing you will hear is they want to be a normal country. You will hear this word all the time. They want to be a normal country. You will hear this word all the time. They want to be a normal country. To them, what that means is some semblance of like they can get rid of their leaders when they don't like them. It doesn't necessarily mean a republic versus a democracy or the electoral college system versus first pass votes, but in their minds minds they want some way to get rid of leaders they don't like. They want to be taken seriously by the rest of the world right, they want to be allowed to travel. They want other people to feel the desire to come travel to their country.

Dave Smith:

Right, and Lukashenko knows these things. He's usually, in the English language world, portrayed as a stooge for Putin, but he is not like when he wants to stick it to Putin or remind Putin that he has does have levers to pull over the Kremlin. He can do it, and you know, last week the regime announced visafree travel to Belarus for 35 different European countries. So there's a bit of a schizophrenia that exists in Lukashenko's regime. And Belarusians on average, you know, considering they live under an authoritarian regime. They tend to be quite well-traveled. Almost all of them speak many languages. Like the dudes I work with, they all speak at least Russian, Belarusian, most of them Ukrainian, a lot of them English.

Dave Smith:

The cultural dynamics and the differences between the Belarusians and the Ukrainians are actually never cease to amaze me. The Ukrainians make a huge deal out of their language, right, huge because it's been outlawed and suppressed so many times and it's a very important thing to them, which makes it also kind of a sticking point a lot of the time. You know, because, like, first of all, a lot of people in eastern ukraine don't speak ukrainian very much. They they might understand it, but it's not their day-to-day language, whereas anywhere, even west, you know, if you speak russian, you get confronted in public, like people say don't speak the language of the invaders. The Belarusians don't have this problem and I think it's one of the reasons that I was able to gel with the regiment pretty quickly is that they've been. Language is so fluid to them and, like, first of all, the Belarusians, it's a dead language. Like I'll tell you, it's very few people speak it.

Dave Smith:

All the people I know who speak in Putin I can name on one hand, but most of them. You know day to day, like we work in four to five different languages, right, they all speak Russian to each other. Some of the old guys speak Belarusian. They speak Belarusian to the young guys. The young guys try to speak Belarusian back to them. They speak Belarusian to the young guys. The young guys try to speak Belarusian back to them. A lot of them speak Polish. A lot of them learned Ukrainian since coming here and almost all of them try to learn English. Right, like, when they meet English speakers, they really, really start to make the effort to try and learn English words and speak English because they know that English is the lingua franca of the free world and they go after it hard, like they really really like dudes that I met, you know, a year and a half ago. We didn't speak a single word of English. I can now talk to fluently just because I talk to them every day.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

How did the people you come into contact with on a daily basis view the upcoming U S presidential election in November?

Dave Smith:

But I got to like, day to day, we don't really talk US politics here. I spend most of my time with other foreigners. Keep that in mind. Right, all my friends are Westerners and Belarusians. So, like I do spend time around the Ukrainian units that we're supporting and whatnot, but I don't think anyone's sitting around going like, oh my God, happen if the us election turns one way or the other. I think there's a general awakening going on in europe that, like europeans, can't rely on the us security umbrella and at least the smart foreign policy people are thinking like what is life, life like without America to protect us?

Dave Smith:

And it's not going well for them.

Frank Radford:

Well, if you're saying that the impact won't be psychologically, it may not be as bad as some suggest, but in terms of the logistic support of Ukraine,

Dave Smith:

There isn't a whole lot of qualitative difference between Trump and Biden.

Dave Smith:

Right, it's like Trump is, he's easily influenced. Right, he's now got a vice president, uh, nominee who has a, you know, pretty vocal you could say I wouldn't say anti-ukrainist stance, but he's anti-us support team. That's not a whole lot of difference than the Biden policy of like give them the weapons but don't let them hit targets. That will make a difference. Like saying here's, attack them but you're not allowed to use them on the things that are firing from Russia, so very popular right now. To compare the early 2020s to the 1930s, and I would say the major difference right between right now and the 1930s is we're facing like half a dozen Hitlers and every single free country is run by Chamberlain. In 1939, the bad guys weren't working together yet the Axis didn't exist until like two, three years into the war. Right, they weren't waging a coordinated attack on the Allies. The difference now is, you know, China, Russia and North Korea like they're literally banding together and making decisions.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Dave, thanks so much for your time. We look forward to speaking with you again.

Dave Smith:

Of course.

Frank Radford:

And stay safe. And that's it from the Delegates Lounge. We'd like to thank our esteemed guests who've graciously allowed us to share their hard-earned insights into what really matters. And then there's you, our listeners, who we hope are sufficiently edified to clamor for more of the same. Do drop in for a weekly episode on Thursday, or from time to time if we're on the road, for special events, in which case there'll be a bonus episode. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and, if you like what you've heard, please take a moment to rate or review the show, as it helps others who share your abiding interest in world affairs to find their way to the Delegates Lounge. You can connect with us on many popular social media platforms or reach out to us directly at infothedelicatesloungecom. We're a small team so we can't respond to every message, but we will read them. Our show this week was written and produced by the host and by yours truly, executive producer, Frank Radford. Until next time, keep calm and curious.