State of the war in Ukraine one year later

And U.S. officials estimate more than 200,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded. And the U.K.'s Defense Secretary says Russia has deployed 97 percent of its ground forces in Ukraine. But as the war enters its second year and Russian forces push to take cities like Bakhmut in the east, Ukrainian forces are burning through ammunition.

CBS News foreign policy and national security contributor H.R. McMaster is here with me now in Studio 57 to discuss. General, thanks for joining us. First thing I want to start with is this war is not where Vladimir Putin thought it was going to be when he launched this attack a year ago. What is going on with the Russian military? It clearly is not the formidable force that we all thought it was a year ago. Well, it's not.

And I think the military, like all institutions in Russia, is suffering from corruption. I mean, the military as an institution was hollowed out like other Russian institutions under Putin who really runs a kind of a criminalized patronage network across all these departments and agencies. The head of the military, the Defense Minister, Shorgu, he has all these medals. He has a zero military experience. But he's just one of Putin's cronies. So he brought into him in this close inner circle along with Potts for Sheff and the head of the intelligence services. So it's poorly led.

You think, hey, it looks like a pretty big defense budget, $68 billion. But about 60% of that goes directly to defense-related industries. And there's a lot of corruption there. So the Russian military, before the invasion, was dealing with kind of table scraps for training and for maintenance. And you just saw it all fall apart because they hadn't trained rigorously. They look good on parade. They look good doing their exercises on a post.

But when it came to close combat, they didn't have the competencies to integrate trained and skilled infantry with mobile protective firepower, like tanks and artillery and air. They could not put together what we refer to as combined arms operations. So it's a hollowed out institution and they just weren't competent. So we have been sort of bracing for, Ukrainians have been bracing for this spring offensive, right? And we've been told over and over again that Vladimir Putin loves anniversaries to expect something around an anniversary, but also with the weather sort of moving towards warmer temperatures, we thought we would see Russia pushing forward. Are we seeing it? Because there seem to be sort of conflicting reports about whether this spring offensive has started. It started and it's failing. And they're going to continue to push really poorly trained infantry into a World War I type battle.

And so what they're trying to do is regain control of all the territory in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. That way Putin could say, hey, we've got what we want. He could save some face. But in the short term, what he wants is just any kind of a victory, something he could say as a victory. That's why all this fighting is going on around Bakhmut, for example. He's trying to envelop that city, force the Ukrainians to withdraw. He's failing to do that.

He's trading thousands of casualties for hundreds of meters of territory. And even if he does drive the Ukrainians out of Bakhmut, there's a big ridge line behind that and there's a river behind that. So there's depth in the Ukrainian defense. Russia cannot sustain an offensive. It's already failing, I believe. The question is, can the Ukrainians disengage enough of their force to build up their own counter offensive force in the next months? But Kremlin has told Grosimov, who's the chief of their general staff, who now is in command in Ukraine, to retake Donetsk and Luhansk by April 1st or by the spring. They're not going to be able to do it.

Let me ask you this question though. Now there's an additional, another element possibility, China. What sort of change could China bring to this war if China decides to provide substantial military aid to Russia? Well, they're already providing substantial aid. They're buying 60% more Russian oil and gas than they were before the war. They're getting a good deal out of it too. They're buying into discount. But they're now the ATM machine for Putin to sustain this war-making machine.

But also what you've seen is the U.S. Department of Commerce has blacklisted a large number of companies, Chinese companies already who are providing material support. And I think what we have now is clear intelligence. It's going to do even more and provide direct lethal assistance. Russia is running out of ammo. They were firing 60,000 rounds a day.

They're firing 20,000 rounds a day now. They're trying to buy ammo now from the Iranians. They're testing some lots of ammunition from the Iranians. They've bought from North Korea. So they desperately need ammunition. And I think China potentially could provide them with that. So then really quickly, General, is this the time to provide jets to Ukraine? Absolutely.

And I think, Emery, we should stop this kind of incremental approach to the war. You can have this weapon system, but not that weapon system. And try to distinguish between what we might call offensive or defensive. They're all defensive weapons because Ukraine is trying to protect their own people. I think there are two military objectives here. One is prevent the Russians from continuing their assault on the Ukrainian people and on their power grid and trying to freeze them to death. And that's a range of weapons systems you need to do that, tiered and layered air defense, long range precision strike against the Russian long range systems, for example.

You need drones and so forth. But then also, they need to generate the combat power for a counter offensive. And that's where you need an air ground team, a combined arms team, to sustain that kind of an offensive. Protect those on the ground so they can get down to business. General, HR McMaster, thank you very much. Thanks, Henry.

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