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- [00:01]
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- [00:32]
Interviewer Bianca
Is Putin fighting a war from a position of power or desperation? Ukraine's drones have been attacking his hometown of St. Petersburg, pushing the war well and truly into the heart of Russia. And at the same time, Russia continues relentless bombing of Ukrainian cities and claims to be advancing. So the question everyone is asking, but nobody seems to be able to clearly answer, is, is who is actually winning? Could Russia, a superpower who should, at least on paper, have won the war within a fairly short period of time, really be now on the back foot against its smaller, less populated neighbour? And ultimately, after more than four years of this war, is this conflict ending or just changing? There's almost nobody better placed to answer these questions than Sam Kiley, who's one of the most experienced experience war correspondence in the world. He was on the ground in Kharkiv before the February 2022 invasion, when most people, journalists and world leaders alike, still thought Putin was bluffing. He's been back to Ukraine more times than most people can count and has reported from the front lines, the bombed cities, the liberated towns and the trenches. He's seen this war evolve from the inside in a way that very few people have.
- [01:47]
Sam Kiley
We've come to a really interesting, probably a crisis point in the war, and I think evidence for that is actually the increase in Russian aerial attacks against Ukraine at large, but also especially Kyiv. So in the last couple of days, one night, we saw over 600 missiles. That's a mixture of drones and ballistic missiles fired at the whole country, more than 20 people killed. That is a particularly bad night for Ukraine. But oddly enough, I, and this may be wishful thinking perhaps on my part, but I do think that this is against the background of Vladimir Putin's forces effectively being on the back foot. He's lashing out at a time where, in broad terms, the Ukrainians have got the initiative. So there's another sign also, I think that the Russians are rattled and that was the recent war games that they conducted in Belarus, which of course is the cross the northern border with Ukraine. It's a route that the Russians used to invade Ukraine at the beginning of their full scale invasion in February 2022. And these war games involved short range nuclear weapons in a signaling that if things went badly for Russia, they might go nuclear. And we've seen that before, I think in the summer of 2022 when the Ukrainians had that amazing counter attack where they drove the Russians out of a significant chunk of territory that the invaders had initially captured. And then on top of that, Bianca, you've got a lot of people inside Russia, some even going public, some Russian officials talking about the dangers that the economy are in. Growth rate now slowing to 0.4% down from estimates at 1.4. 40% of the economy, though, is locked into this military effort. And the Ukrainians on the front lines have definitely got the initiative. And this has been quite an interesting change from my analysis. Not that my analysis has changed, but the analysis of others have changed quite radically over the last year when lots of the sort of Foreign Office type officials were steepling the wisdom of their fingertips and saying, well, at the end of the day, the Ukrainians are going to have to make an accommodation. And I would be saying, no, no, they're winning and they can win and they just need the right kind of kit. They've actually made the right kind of kit themselves. They rely much, much more on equipment that they're making themselves. And that is a turning point, not just in this war, but I think it's going to redefine NATO in the future.
- [04:30]
Interviewer Bianca
President Trump said that when he was campaigning that if he got into office, he'd be able to end the war in 24 hours. What has the Trump factor done to Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Has it helped Ukraine, helped Russia, or just added a dose of unpredictability into something that's already chaotic?
- [04:51]
Sam Kiley
Well, at the very beginning, when Trump made that claim, which he made repeatedly, this was the same Donald Trump who said that the United States must never get involved in pointless, never ending Middle Eastern wars. We now know with hindsight that, that Donald Trump didn't exist. But in the case of Ukraine, we now know that by bringing an end to that war within 24 hours, he may well have meant throwing his support effectively behind the Russians, because that's what he very rapidly did. How did he do that? Well, he immediately cut all military aid to the Ukrainians. The net amount of aid being spent by the United States at the time, he claimed, was some 300 billion. It wasn't anything close to half of that was the total amount of American military aid. I think it's been about 120 billion, but he cut that off in a oner. The only military aid that the Ukrainians did continue to get was an intelligence feed that has been extremely important from satellites mostly, but that's also cross NATO. But it is the United States that has most of the NATO assets in that regard. And he even switched that off for a period in order to try to pressurize the Ukrainians into a peace deal. And in the various iterations of peace offers being made by the Russians to the Ukrainians, the United States administration has absolutely consistently taken the Russian line without equivocation. And that has gone through a number of iterations. Now, the Trump administration has signaled that it's pretty much given up on this whole issue, not least because they've got themselves embroiled in an illegal war in the Middle east against Iran alongside Israel. So that's preoccupying the Trump administration. In that period, though, this has been the period in which you saw this collapse of support from the Americans, renewed support, re energized support having to come from the Europeans, who arguably should have been the primary donors anyway, since they had the most to lose from a Russian occupation, Ukraine. But above all, we've seen this extraordinary explosion of an entirely new approach to the manufacture of arms, the kind of arms that are made and the way that they are constantly being refined in real time. So the Ukrainians went from a standing start to being, I'm afraid, alongside the Russians, the absolute top technologists when it comes to modern warfare at the moment.
- [07:36]
Interviewer Bianca
Let's go back to the start, because you were in Ukraine before Russia launched the invasion. What do you remember thinking leading up to the invasion of how likely it was and also in the morning that it started?
- [07:50]
Sam Kiley
Well, I mean, at the time I was working for cnn and Jim Sciuto, who's a very distinguished security correspondent at cnn, had very, very good contacts and they were giving him information almost in real time, it seemed, about Russian maneuvers and warning that this was serious and that they were going to come in. I believe Jim's reporting, but I couldn't believe that the Russians would do it. I think that was naive of me. We now know that that was naive of me. The Brits were saying similar things.
- [08:22]
Interviewer Bianca
You've covered so many conflicts, Sam. Why did you think that Russia wouldn't do it?
- [08:29]
Sam Kiley
Mainly, I think because the idea, the lessons of somewhere like Iraq were that a power such as the United States and its allies could, in the case of Iraq, come up with a pack of lies as an excuse to invade another country. In other words, they could rip up international law so that that door had been opened for Vladimir Putin by the United States, the United Kingdom and other allies in terms of international law. If they did it, why shouldn't he? So that didn't seem like an objective that he couldn't overcome. But the failure of the long term occupation of Iraq and the catastrophe that followed American withdrawal should have taught him that rushing into a country like Ukraine and flipping the government was not going to be easy. What we now know, of course, is that the briefings he was getting from his own intelligence people were in the sort of traditions of Stalin and the old Soviet Union built around what the boss wanted to hear, perhaps, rather than the reality. That's the first thing. The second thing is that the Ukrainians themselves made almost no effort to prepare for this invasion. I mean, I was in Kharkiv at the time. I drove up to the Russian border and smeagled around right on the border. I think two days, certainly not more than two days, maybe had been maybe the day before the invasion was nothing. I even bumped into a Ukrainian senior Ukrainian colonel at some kind of event in Kharkiv and said, you don't look like you're making many preparations. And he said, oh well, you're not supposed to.
- [10:18]
Interviewer Bianca
Meaning what?
- [10:20]
Sam Kiley
Well, meaning that they had secret capacities lying in wait. We now know that kind of wasn't true. What was really interesting about that first phase of the war. So if you remember, you had a kind of a north, south invasion from Belarus, straight towards, straight down basically through Hostomel, which was a big airport north of Kiev, headquarters or a main base with Ukrainian paratroopers that was attacked by a huge number of helicopter gunships and Russian special forces and paratroopers, the absolute cream of the Russian crop. And then they also came in on a northeastern axis through Sumy province towards Kyiv. At the same time there was an invasion coming in from the south, going northwest out of Crimea towards Kherson, which they captured very quickly, the Russians, that is, captured very quickly. And then they tried to punch through and succeeded in kind of lozenges of significant territory right up to the edge of towns like Kharkiv in pretty short order, because the Ukrainian forces really were not kind of war wise. They did not seem to have where they had not already got military entrenchment. They didn't seem to have made many preparations. But what did happen then, and this is an extraordinary part of the story and something I've been working on long Term is small groups of veterans from Russia's invasion of 2014, 2015. Volunteers who joined militias really in those days because the sort of Soviet type structures of the Ukrainian military were inadequate then to deal with invaders. Essentially pretty swashbuckling reconnaissance type, old school SAS type people who got themselves, organized themselves into their own groups, got hold of some pickup trucks, got hold of some of the N laws and the Javelin shoulder launched anti tank missiles. And then you'll remember those, those invading convoys that got stuck and you saw those amazing videos of them being hit from the side and then triumphant Ukrainian farmers stealing Russian tanks and all this kind of stuff that was all really as a consequence of a semi disorganized defence. There was a very serious defense by very disorganized groups of people in Hostomel. And the invading Russian paratroops got an absolute hammering there. They did overcome the defenders, but they lost a lot of aircraft and they were very stunned by the response then. And then they were ambushed in the woods. And these were by guys I knew, got to know very, very well. Half of them at least are dead and in fact a lot of them were killed later on in that year. But these small groups of determined young men in the traditions of the SAs who motivated themselves and held up those convoys. I know one tank commander who captured a tank that had been abandoned in a muddy field by obviously a highly demotivated Russian crew, a T82 tank that he nicknamed Bunny. And I got to know him very well on one night he was able using his tea. And these are all volunteers in unformed units. These are just guys who got together into a pickup truck, organized themselves, got one of them, had a wife who was spying behind enemy lines. They located for example, a Russian forming up point, full of armor, full of tanks and armored personnel carriers. And this guy whose call sign is Grumpy, well earned. Actually he's a grumpy fellow. Be difficult to find driving Bunny, which he'd learnt to learn. He'd learned to drive this T82 using YouTube. He then took out and destroyed 14 armored vehicles, including tanks in one night. That is the sort of record that would be a stunning exception. I am not aware of any tank ever knocking out 14 armored vehicles in one engagement at any time during the whole of the Second World War, for example. So these extraordinary moments of heroism gave saved Kyiv. They weren't the only thing that saved Kid. Big things were going on in the air as well. But that turned the war caused the Russians to be winded. And then very rapidly the Ukrainians were able to turn that back and force the invaders back in that summer of, of 2022. But then the lines of course got kind of frozen.
- [15:26]
Interviewer Bianca
Yeah, I remember when I was anchoring and the assumptions of many were that Kyiv would fall pretty early. And like you say, getting that defense together in that haphazard but very determined way was not what most people expected. So In April of 2022, the reports and photos emerged of the Bucha massacre, later confirmed to be war crimes. What do you remember about that and what did that tell you about what kind of war it was going to be?
- [15:58]
Sam Kiley
I think that was a really. The other point about which I think the international community, myself included, was somewhat naive, was that we didn't really have any experience of what Russian troops were like, but the Ukrainians did. Historically, they knew exactly what they were dealing with. So in the areas that the Russians captured, which included Bucha and Irpin, which are the sort of posh districts to the north of Kyiv, really nice areas, they were captured and then occupied by troops who went on murderous rampages, were thieving. There was, you could. The Russians were too dim to figure out that they should knockout CCTV cameras. So war crimes were captured on cctv. The murder of civilians was seen on cctv. And then I. Not just Ukrainians, but foreign fighters who took part in the recapture of that area, but also were driven out of that area at the beginning described very, very as foreign fighters who joined the Ukrainian forces, Americans, Brits and others, ferocious fighting, hand to hand fighting with quite well trained troops who it would seem may have been then replaced by less well trained troops. All these trained troops, we're talking the elite troops, went on this sort of killing spree. Now it wasn't a systematic genocide in the same way that we saw in Srebrenica or Rwanda or in the wholesale destruction of Gaza, as in clearly a tactical or strategic decision. This was more just the way the Russian troops did things in areas under their occupation. They murdered people. They murdered people in Irpin, in Bucha, they murdered people in Sumy, they murdered people in Kherson. I mean, right now they're hunting civilians, they're training their drone pilots on civilians, on what they call hunting safaris on the streets of Kherson because it's nearby. So it's not a complicated flight for a trainee pilot to go and kill an old lady. So that is, that is what the Ukrainians knew they were dealing with. But I think those of us in the outside world didn't really appreciate that the Russian army of the 21st century was the same as the Red army that committed so many atrocities during the Second World War.
- [18:34]
Interviewer Bianca
That's really interesting. And then of course, later in 2022, Ukraine mounted these very impressive counter offensives and liberated cities. They're moving into 2023. I suppose that feels like a grinding middle. And Bakmut might be one of the best examples where you had Prigozhin's Wagner army involved. What did that. What does that tell us about the Russian strategy that you were just speaking to as well, how this war is approached, how manpower is approached, what is driving them and how they feel about Ukrainians?
- [19:12]
Sam Kiley
Well, I think we need to go one stage back. So the Ukrainians regained the initiative and were able to, as you point out, in the summer of 2022, recapture this land and regain the initiative. And they were very fast. It was a very fast collapse. And let's remember that word collapse, because remind me to come back to it in terms of how do we see the future of the Russian forces? And I was there with them. You know, the speed of the Russian withdrawal meant that they abandoned tanks, they charged in. I was in the first group of people that went into Izium, for example, which was prior, a few days prior, you would have been shot to ribbons if you got anywhere near that city. The whole villages have been utterly devastated in this sort of artillery slugging match that had gone on. And then suddenly they collapsed. And the Ukrainians pushed all the way to places like Bakhmut, where that's the point at which the Russians got their command and control back under command, under command and control. They were able to pause. The Ukrainian logistics lines have got so stretched by rapid advance, there's always a danger. So they decided to consolidate. Both sides dug in. And then Bakhmut became a kind of a symbol really. It's in Donetsk, it's near the river, it's east of Kramatorsk. It was seen, it's on a bit of high ground. It's very famous for its champagne, locally produced champagne. And it was quite a nice town. I mean, I was there as the Russians started to attack. People were coming and going. Lots of people were in and out all the time. But what happened was that as the Russians started to consolidate their defense, they then switched to what became known as these meat attacks. And these were proper old school Soviet doctrine. Throw enough human beings at a point on the front line and some will punch through. So I spoke to several fighters and was in, in the town, so the town would get shelled or bombed from the air. And then what they called the Zero line was for a long time outside the city. And that's where the Russians were trying to punch through using their sheer mass. The fact that they had more people in the country and more money than the Ukrainians in their minds meant that they could win this by throwing human beings, particularly from the Wagner group, at the Ukrainian and foreign fighters. And so the Ukrainian lines, I mean, I knew people there who were killing 20 to 30 people a day sitting on a machine gun, just plowing down, hosing down wave after wave after wave of Russians. And then what would happen is that two or three Russians might survive that attack and invest a little hole in the ground or a bombed out building. And then another 200 would be sent into the effort, but two would get through. So now the Russians had four. And that's really how they were advancing in places like Bakhmut. They also of course completely dominated the air, so they were able to drop both guided and unguided bombs with no real opposition. So it was extremely difficult for the Ukrainians to continue to fight, but they did. And then of course, during this period the Ukrainians were denied any medium range ATACM type rockets. This was a period, the first two years of this war really. The Ukrainians were being asked to fight with at least one hand behind tight hide behind their backs. Lethal aid had not been provided by any NATO member until just before the invasion of 2022. And the country was first invaded in 2014. And according to an accord agreed in the 90s, the United Kingdom, United States and others were duty bound and had signed a memorandum of understanding that they would come to the defense of Ukraine if Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons. Ukraine did give up its nuclear weapons and they didn't come to its defense. Not only that, but they wouldn't even give them the weapons to defend themselves or even sell them the weapons, including the Brits. It was only right at the last minute that anybody gave them anything that would have allowed them to survive this. And by the way, the Russians had been blowing up secret, not secret. The explosions were kind of nuclear in size, but they had been had covert groups that had blown up some of the major weapons dumps, the major supply bases behind Ukrainian lines before the 2022 invasion. So it was an extraordinary period in which a lot of Ukrainians also got killed in Bakhmut and a lot of them really resented it. There was a strong feeling among Ukrainians that it was a silly thing to bother to defend because they knew that they would lose it in the end and they did, but they haven't withdrawn that far back. They're now in some high ground overlooking Bakhmut, which is where they wanted to be rather than in Bakhmut for the
- [24:33]
Interviewer Bianca
reasons you just described. Ukraine being the David to the Goliath in this situation, clearly has to think about creative ways to counteract the asymmetry. One of those that we're seeing a lot at the moment is strikes into Russian territory that seem to be increasing in frequency and also depth. When did that start? What's the point of that? Is it working?
- [25:00]
Sam Kiley
Yeah, it's certainly working. It started about a couple of years ago. If the first real signs of this was the use of actually the Franco British Storm Shadow cruise missile dropped from Ukrainian aircraft partly with a lot of technology, so we say, supplied by the Brits and the French, that reached into targets inside Russia. And that was a major turning point in this war. When the Ukrainian allies, finally the penny dropped that you can't. Not only were they not getting the right kind of weapons, but the weapons that they were being supplied were being limited as to how they could be used. And if you want to fight a war, you go after the liaistics. And so that's how it began. But very rapidly the Ukrainians have done two things, three things really in terms of the development of their own. They're called. They're missiles, not drones, but they're guided. They're basically kind of primitive looking cruise missiles. So they've now developed one called the Flamingo which has I think a range of over 3,000 km, carrying about, I can't remember the exact figure, but.
- [26:19]
Interviewer Bianca
Is that an ice cream truck?
- [26:24]
Sam Kiley
I can't hear an ice cream.
- [26:25]
Interviewer Bianca
I thought I had an ice cream truck.
- [26:26]
Sam Kiley
Well, if you want to nip out and get me a 99, that'd be great. Sorry to break your flag. That's all right. The Ukrainians got this Flamingo which has an enormously. It's got a range of more than three times what a Tomahawk missile has, I think carries a payload, an astronomically big payload and is not super accurate. But they've had some success, very deep strikes with that. They then got the sort of semi medium range drones and missiles. This is the Ukrainians that have been able to hit Moscow. But above all, what they've been focusing on in the initial phases were oil refineries. Particularly in oil refineries, the area where they do what's called the cracking, when they separate out the crude oil into the various Refined products and very, very carefully targeting those locations, particularly in the west of Russia, but also further and further in. They've also been, and they did this very early on, probably using a lot of Western intelligence to do this inside Ukrainian territory, going after and killing the Russian leadership. Do you remember at the beginning of this war, lots of Russian generals and colonels were getting knocked off partly because a lot of them are incredibly dim. I mean these guys are thick as mints. You know, some of them were killed on the third attempt in the same location. You know, so they would go and set themselves up on the edge of an airfield, get bombed, survive, carry on, get bombed again, survive, and then finally all get blown up. I mean it just strange, absolutely moronic, but very, very Soviet.
- [28:13]
Interviewer Bianca
Why is, why is that Soviet? What's Soviet about that?
- [28:15]
Sam Kiley
Because human beings just don't matter. You know, let's chuck people at it doesn't matter. It's all about, it's all about weight of numbers. It's very, very crude military thinking. But also what went on is the Ukrainians were bumping off senior officers on the streets of Moscow and that, that has properly rattled them. So they've gone after the personnel deep in country. They've gone after the oil refining structures deep in country. They also had that amazing operation, went very deep into the country. Ukrainians sent in trucks with, with fake sheds on the back of trucks and the lids, the roofs of the sheds opened and AI powered drones launched out and took out large numbers of air force attack aircraft quite deep inside Russia in an amazing operation. Oh, by the way, throughout this period the Ukrainians have won the battle of the Black Sea. No Russian navy can sail anywhere in the Black Sea and they're sinking the Russians navy in ports and they're doing that without a navy. I've been on one of, I think the four ships that the Russians have out of Odessa and we were able to go 15, 20 miles offshore at a time when I would have absolutely wet myself in terror. Or you know, six months prior to that, I would never have got on that ship. So small. It was a coastal cutter. Because they're using drones. They've completely won the battle of the Black Sea. So in this process of developing these medium range drones, they've also developed short range defensive drones to knock out incoming missiles. And then both sides have been working very effectively. The Ukraine is just ahead in this new form of warfare in which the FPV drones that are flown by kind of people wearing a gamer set, using gamer controls, fly bombs straight onto People or they drop them from sort of little whirligig.
- [30:31]
Interviewer Bianca
When were you closest to wetting yourself in terror or did you follow through?
- [30:43]
Sam Kiley
Funny enough, when it, when things go. When the, when the bang, bang starts, one is, I have a very, you know, I'm not, I'm not too fussed. It's usually a relief. And the, the thing about this war is the anticipation of it, particularly the anticipation of getting closer and close to the front line at the moment with the drone threat is it definitely gets one's bum twitching because you really pray for bad weather and high winds, because these drones are almost invisible and they kind of don't miss. So it's not the same as figuring out, even if you're in a town at the beginning of this war, one could be in somewhere like Kramatorsk and know that you'd be unbelievably unlucky to get hit by a stray missile, so long as you were away from an obvious target or something like that. And so one could put up with what for most civilian, most normal people would be very weird. You know, your whole building's getting shaken by incoming explosions, but you would know that they're going to be a kilometer away or, you know, there was always a gamble, but it was fine. Now you've got drones that are hunting people, hunting children, going into those areas quite deep. So the front line has gone from a kind of narrow series of trenches to this blasted hellscape of many 15 kilometers deep. And then beyond that, you've got Russian drones. Some of the loitering drones, the Lancet, for example, can stay up. You can't hear it, it's out of sight. But the Ukrainians have got very good monitoring system, so one has to plug into that. But it's also quite scary when you're driving around in a normal car and then you see all of the Ukrainians are covered like hedgehogs in ECM systems, electronic countermeasures, jamming systems designed to protect them. They don't work against fiber optic drones, though. And the Russians, the Russians have some very good technology and some very good units. And the only area where I've heard Ukrainians express respect for their Russian opponents has been a group called Rubicon, who are the kind of elite drone pilots of the Russian effort. And the Ukrainians who I've been with on the front lines there have said that you can tell when they're there and you can tell when they've left their training behind. And they, they. And they, they are bad News from the Ukrainians perspective.
- [33:23]
Interviewer Bianca
You've obviously spoken to Ukrainian soldiers on the front line from the very beginning, all throughout the war. Has their optimism or belief in the fact that Ukraine can win changed throughout that time? And what do they articulate as what they're fighting for?
- [33:45]
Sam Kiley
They're very clear what they're fighting for and I think people forget who they are. So Ukraine is certainly the east of Ukraine was really basically broadly speaking Cossack country. So this was a territory of very strong traditions of elections, of democracy in a way that was well ahead of many of the other countries in the west in that the Cossack communities would elect their own hetman, their own kind of king, boss. So there was no inherited power system. It was very, these are horse based people, warrior people, pretty naughty boys who didn't take kindly to being told what to do. The Russians had serfs and then, and then the Soviet system basically enslaved everybody. So this was a point of great resistance to both the Russian empire under Catherine the Great, it was the first to kind of seize territory in Ukraine and then very strongly under the Soviets. That meant that by the early 1930s, as part of the Soviet effort to get enough grain to generate enough foreign currency to exist at all, more than, well, at least 3 million. Some people estimate 7 million Ukrainians were systematically starved to death, mostly in the east of the country. Cities like Kharkiv had people flopping down dead all over. So they had been subject. And that was one of three major Soviet famines caused by the, by the Soviets after the 1920s that the Ukrainian endured until the last one being in 1946. So they really hated the Russians. There was none of this Russian idea is that oh, we're basically brothers and sisters and we're all the same people. This is all just an argument. No, that is absolutely not where the Ukrainians are coming from. It's also just historically inaccurate. So you know that, that, that motivation runs very, very strongly through all Ukrainians through the generations. I think then you have. What's quite interesting is there was a bit of, especially among the older generations, a sort of nostalgia for Russia. But Putin killed that when he killed all the Russian speaking people in Mariupol. The whole of the east, most of the cities of the east are overwhelmingly cities where people speak Russian as a first language. Kramatorsk is about 80%. Mariupol was more than 90%. So that is a city that the Russians flattened that was actually settled by Russians who had replaced dead Ukrainians with Russians after the 1930s invaded the country to protect those self same Russians and then kill them all or turn them into refugees. So that has meant that the Russian speaking communities in Ukraine are very rabidly anti Russian now. And that is that whole kind of aspect of Putin's motivation or excuse for going into Ukraine has been blown away. I think that the kind of should we give up some of this land in return for peace has sort of ebbed and flowed quite a lot among soldiers. When they're exhausted, they just think, ah, you know, for God's sake, let's just put an end to this, let's keep what we've got and leave the Russians to it. But 100% of the people I've spoken to, even the ones who think that that might be a good idea, have said, well, they won't stop there. You know, they've had deals with Russia before, the Murmansk agreements, two of them in the past that caused a ceasefire in Ukraine, agreed with Russia is simply a pause for Russia to rearm and retrain and then re invade. And they know that. And finally NATO is also figuring that out because NATO's been like this all the way through, not wanting to see reality because reality means all sorts of political problems. Countries like the United Kingdom or Germany or France or wherever it might be, you're going to have to pay more taxes, you, you might have to have national service and you might end up at war with Russia. It's all bad news. There's no upside to any of this. So who wants to be a politician? Who's going to sell that when you can leave the war over in Ukraine? But there is, I think now a growing understanding that that is non viable and that actually with the right equipment, the right training, the right energy behind them, the Russians can collapse those, sorry, the Ukrainians can collapse the Russians again and force them out of the country, force a defeat on Russia, not a compromise with Russia. And I think that's slowly dawning on Ukraine's allies. And that at the end of the day is the solution that Ukrainians know they need. But they are quite exhausted in the, in the dying to get there. But they're quite encouraged at the moment that they're short range, short medium range drones are making the Russian war effort much, much harder to prosecute that. The Russians are definitely on the back foot,
- [39:02]
Interviewer Bianca
thank you. So.