CNN: Europe’s top spy comments on the battlefield situation in Ukraine and Putin’s stance
A European intelligence official told CNN that Russian President Vladimir Putin is running out of time to achieve victory in his war against Ukraine, amid a stalemate on the battlefield and worsening domestic conditions.
In an interview at the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service headquarters in Tallinn, Kaupo Rosin, the agency’s chief, said: “Putin may not be able to negotiate from a position of strength in the next four or five months”.
Rosin outlined a range of economic, military, and social pressures facing Putin that might force him to the negotiating table by saying that, “Time isn’t on Russia’s side”.
Estonia, the former Soviet republic, has now become a hub for monitoring NATO movements, and Rosin spends most of his career analyzing events within its domineering and hostile neighbor.
“I no longer hear any talk of an all-out victory… Officials in the Kremlin realize that the situation on the Ukrainian battlefield is not good,” Rosin says, adding that Moscow is losing more men than it can recruit.
In the two years prior to January, Russian forces advanced at a rate of 70 meters (230 feet) per day, with about 1,000 soldiers killed or wounded each day, according to analysts from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC, and others, and even those minor developments have stalled intermittently this year.
From his part, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week: “The Russians are losing between 15,000 and 20,000 soldiers a month, killed, not wounded”.
In April, 35,203 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, a figure similar to that recorded in the previous two months, while CNN was unable to independently verify casualties on either side. Moscow and Kyiv have declined to release official figures.
Drones are causing most of the casualties, a technology in which both Ukraine and Russia have invested heavily.
Rosin expects this shift toward drone warfare to limit changes on the front lines, as he added that both sides are currently unable to achieve a large-scale, automated breakthrough into areas deep within enemy lines.
The balance of power between the two sides in drone technology has fluctuated as the war has progressed, but Ukraine claims that a new generation of interceptor aircraft is reducing the impact of Russian attacks on its cities.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said this week: “The number of Shahid drones shot down by interceptor aircraft has doubled in the past four months”.
