SUBSCRIBER + INTERVIEW - We say this often, but it really is a pivotal moment in Russia's war against Ukraine. While Russian troops make small gains — at enormous cost — in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian troops are holding hundreds of square miles of Russian territory, following their bold incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. Next week Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will be in the U.S., where he says he will deliver a peace plan to President Joe Biden (and — if the Republican Party nominee wishes to see it — to Donald Trump as well). All the while, Zelensky is pleading with Biden and other world leaders to drop restrictions on the use of western long-range missiles for deep strikes on Russian territory, not least because Russia is mounting a major effort to cripple Ukrainian energy infrastructure as another winter of war approaches.
With so much in play, The Cipher Brief caught up with General David Petraeus (Ret.) on the sidelines of the 20th Yalta European Strategy (YES) conference in Kyiv, for an upcoming edition of The Cipher Brief's new weekly talk show, The World Deciphered (airing this Sunday, October 22).
Petraeus, who is also a Cipher Brief expert, offered a sweeping look at the state of the war, from the battlefield to the decision making in Kyiv and Moscow. What has stood out to the former CIA Director is Ukraine’s capacity to innovate for war needs at an “unprecedented” scale and pace, a rate of innovation which Petraeus said far surpasses the innovative capacity of the U.S., given its large and antiquated systems of bringing new ideas to the fore. “When the guns fall silent here," he said, "Ukraine is going to be a military industrial powerhouse with the ability to innovate much more rapidly than anything that we have.”
Cipher Brief CEO Suzanne Kelly spoke with Petraeus in Kyiv. You can watch the full interview this Sunday by subscribing to The Cipher Brief's digital channel on YouTube.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Cipher Brief: We have been fortunate enough to travel with you several times to Ukraine. I wonder if we could start out by talking about the state of the war today. It's very different than it was when we first came here with you a year ago.
Petraeus: It is very different. Both sides have evolved in a number of different ways. It's a challenging period obviously for Ukraine. The Russians are putting considerable pressure on Donetsk and Luhansk in the southeastern part of the country. They've been pushing around Kharkiv, although the Ukrainians largely stabilized that, and even pushed them back in some areas. And then on the other hand, the Ukrainians have launched this very impressive operation into the Kursk Oblast (region) of Russia, which took the Russians completely by surprise, and which is really extraordinary when you think that elements of four different mechanized brigades plus artillery, air defense, engineers, drones, and all these supporting logistics were assembled for this, and they moved very rapidly into Russian soil and actually control a thousand square kilometers or so, to which the Russians are now having finally to react in a very substantial manner. They captured hundreds of Russian soldiers, and they just had the third prisoner swap as a result of this operation.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainians in the Black Sea have sunk one third of the Russian Black Sea fleet. They forced the final Russian ship in the centuries-old port of Sevastopol in Crimea to withdraw. And they did this without a navy, essentially did it with aerial drones that found the ships and other intelligence, and then maritime drones that sunk them, and that basically pushed the Russians back, very close to the Russian ports in the Eastern Black Sea. This opens up the Western Black Sea for Ukraine to use to export grain. This is very important to their fiscal bottom line, and very important to Egypt's food security.
But I think the most significant development since we were here last is the innovation that we see taking place.
It is unprecedented in my view. The pace of it is insane, really. I've never seen anything like this. Our systems (in the U.S.) cannot compare with this. Yes, they're sort of cheapish, but they're cranking them out in massive numbers. The last time I talked to a Ukrainian leader before this trip, the goal was to have 1 million drones produced every 12 months. It is now multiples of that. And so the Ukrainians are throwing thousands of first-person-view suicide drones at the enemy every day, right on the front lines. You have other drones that are going a bit deeper, dropping bombs on them, others that are going even deeper than that, actually going into Russian territory and going after the Russian oil refineries and storage sites and other critical infrastructure that are supporting the war effort. So we’ve seen all of these different dynamics.
And then maybe the most significant development is that the Ukrainians passed a law that was very important some months ago. And this is a change to their conscription law, very significant because they now have to get their force-generation process going both for individual replacements, for units that have sustained losses and wounded in action, but also to create new units as the additional equipment arrives and so forth.
That is one to watch, relative to what the Russians are doing, as they reportedly have been falling short of their own recruiting goals. But this still poses real challenges for Ukraine, keeping in mind that Russia has at least a four-to-one manpower advantage over Ukraine, and probably a ten- to fifteen-to-one economic advantage. And they've really cranked up the defense industrial base of their economy, with support from China with components, Iran with missiles and drones, North Korea, a million rounds of heavy artillery, munitions and so on.
But to come back again to the Ukrainian innovation, because that is what is so striking, so breathtaking, really to see what they're doing, constantly changing the software, changing the frequencies, changing the routes, enabling with AI and all the rest. And again, they're sending thousands of these drones, that shouldn't be thought of as weapon systems — they should be thought of as munitions. This is the first military in the world that has a new branch of service along with Army and Navy Air Force, Marines and special ops — they now also have an unmanned systems service, and they're populating that with battalions, and there are going to be regiments and so forth.
Again, the innovation that is going on, supported by Ukrainian companies, is unlike anything I have ever seen. In the U.S., our process produces yesterday's technology for tomorrow's wars. They're producing tomorrow's technology for today's wars, and it is just moving again at a pace that I've never seen anyway.
The Cipher Brief: You've said that the Ukrainians have the capacity to be producing a lot more drones. If they had the funding, how much of a difference would that make in this war?
Petraeus: It would make a huge difference. Your capacity is your ability to make. The funding is what determines how much of that capacity you can actually exercise, how many you can actually make. And the bottom line is they can make a lot more – I don't want to get into specific numbers, but they can make much more, and they're throwing thousands of suicide drones at the enemy every day. They could do even more. And if you think about this as a round of ammunition, you approach it differently.
People remark that there's no close air support on this battlefield because it's such a lethal anti-air environment. The Russians aren't flying right over their troops, and Ukrainians certainly aren't flying over Russian troops and dropping bombs just ahead of the advance or as the enemy is attacking. The drones are doing it. Think of it: this is their close air support in many respects, and again, the conceptual employments of this are evolving so very rapidly. Every battalion now has a drone platoon.
So they do need more money, without question. They could increase the capacity. When the guns fall silent here, Ukraine is going to be a military-industrial powerhouse, with the ability to innovate much more rapidly than anything that we have. Our large defense companies, they can't do what is being done out here, in part because the system is so very different. And in part because we're not fighting for our very survival and our war of independence in the way that Ukraine is.
The Cipher Brief: When we were last here with you, in April, there was a lot of frustration over the fact that the U.S. wasn't getting supplies that were much needed to the battlefield quickly enough. Now there’s a lot of frustration here over whether the U.S. is going to lift the restrictions on the use of long-range weapon systems that can reach military targets deeper inside of Russia. Strategically speaking, how important would that be?
Petraeus: It's very important, though it's not a silver bullet, it's not a total game changer. But what it would do, if you lift the restrictions on the use of the army tactical missile systems (ATACMS), which could go 300 kilometers – is put in range (military facilities) that are not in range right now. And while some of these have been moved, many of these are fixed infrastructure installations and you can't move those. And it's many dozens of facilities, over a hundred, I believe, that would be within range that are not now held at threat. And given what Russia has done to Ukraine, it's incomprehensible to me why we have not allowed them to use these systems to their full effect.
And the same with the British Storm Shadow, a similar weapons system, which also is not allowed to use its full capability in terms of range. I was hoping that there was going to be an announcement when the UK Prime Minister and President Biden met (last week). There's a meeting between (Ukrainian) President Zelensky and President Biden (next week). Maybe that will be one of the deliverables from that. We'll see. But I think it's long overdue, and given that the Russians have bombed the Children's Hospital in Kyiv, and another hospital just 48 hours before that, and given that the Ukrainians have been attacking targets on Russian soil and now even control a thousand square kilometers of Russian territory, I don't see how this is going to bring about some new escalations.
The Russians are throwing everything they can at the Ukrainians, much of it devastatingly destructive, and not precise. Russia’s 6,000-pound glide bombs have extraordinarily devastating effects, and they're not that precise. These are hitting cities like Kharkiv, and of course the Russians have hit all of the hydroelectric plants in Ukraine now. They haven't knocked all of them out, but those are very hard to repair. They're going after other electrical generation infrastructure, and of course the blackouts are vastly greater during this trip than they were in the past. It's going to be a very long, and I fear, dark, cold winter ahead for Ukraine. That's another area in which we need to help them, and the EU and U.S. certainly are doing that.
The Cipher Brief: Are you worried at all about Putin's threats, which some are speculating might be the reason why the U.S. has been slower than some people had hoped in making the announcement that it would lift those restrictions?
Petraeus: I think you always have to worry. That's especially what former intelligence chiefs should do. But I don't think that these are any different from the previous threats that ended up being hollow. The Ukrainians have crossed every red line that the Russians have put down, and again, the Russians are doing everything they possibly can, and I don't think they're going to escalate to tactical nuclear weapons, nor do I think they would be as insane as to pick a fight with a NATO country. They don't need more fights than they already have. They're losing staggering numbers of soldiers on the front lines in southeastern Ukraine. They're just throwing waves of humans at them. And they're untrained soldiers.
When we sat with the (Ukrainian) Intelligence chief the other day, he mentioned that they have some recent prisoners of war that they took. They're talking to them. The (Russian) soldier is there just a matter of days or weeks, he was just thrown into a unit. He'd never even met his battalion commander. He doesn't know his company, his commander's face. The Russians were ordered to move to a forest and they got captured. This soldier, he spent less than a month actually in training, so this is not rigorous training. It's throwing massive quantities of money at recruiting, getting them in the ranks, and then really misusing them in a lot of ways.
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