Bill Browder: Is Russia Losing the Ukraine War?

**Steve Paikin** (0:00)
According to Russian military bloggers, the average life expectancy of a new Russian recruit, from arrival at a training ground to death in a combat zone, lies somewhere between 10 days and three weeks. Once sent onto the battlefield, Russian soldiers survive an average of 20 to 35 minutes. By some accounts, Russia is now incurring eight men killed or seriously wounded, for every one lost by Ukraine.
According to a British intelligence agency, Russian war deaths have likely reached almost half a million, and various Western sources put total Russian casualties that's killed and wounded at significantly more than a million. Is Russia, population 140 million, actually losing the war to Ukraine, population 40 million? That's coming up next on The Paikin Podcast.
I am very happy to welcome to The Paikin Podcast in London, UK, Bill Browder. He is the CEO of Hermitage Capital, head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, and the author of two great books that I interviewed him about on the old show I used to host, The Agenda on TVO. They're called Red Notice and Freezing Order. I would recommend both of them to you. And Bill Browder, it's great to see you again. How are we doing today?

**Bill Browder** (1:28)
I'm doing very well, particularly well since we're watching Ukraine scoring all these points on the battlefield, which I think is kind of unexpected.

**Steve Paikin** (1:39)
Well, let me follow up on that. We gave some stats off the top about how badly this war is going for Russia at the moment. How would you characterize the state of the war today?

**Bill Browder** (1:48)
Well, I think that, to put it in really simple terms, if you remember that shocking meeting at the Oval Office where Donald Trump shouted at Vladimir Zelensky and said, We don't have any cards, well, I think that Ukraine right now has got a full house, and they're doing a really solid job of beating the Russians in a lot of very important areas, both on the battlefield and in terms of Russia's economy. And I think that that is changing the whole direction of this war.

**Steve Paikin** (2:24)
Tell me more about that. Where is Russia losing? Where is Ukraine winning this war?

**Bill Browder** (2:30)
Well, first and foremost, as Putin announced at the very beginning, he wanted to take over Ukraine.
He is now sending in, and you quoted a figure of half a million deaths. I've heard numbers higher than that. I think there's one estimate that says one to, I should say one and a half million dead and wounded Russian soldiers. So there's been enormous casualties that the Ukrainians have inflicted on Russian troops. And these casualties don't come with any territorial gains. Russia is basically in a static position, which is really a tremendous accomplishment. How has Ukraine done that? Ukraine has done that by mastering the art of drone warfare. They've created what they call a drone kill zone on the front line, which means that any Russian soldier who tries to cross the front line basically dies. And the kill zone is very interesting because it doesn't require one drone per operator. You could have one operator and many, many dozens of drones that are all seeking out bodies of warm bodies of Russian soldiers to kill.
And so the Russians are not making any progress on the front line. And so historically, what the Russians had done was they had started to, in addition to not making any progress, they would start bombing Ukrainians in big cities, bombing civilians.
And that was really painful to watch because the Ukrainians were just getting bombed and they were doing their best to try to shoot down the bombs that were coming in, shoot down the drones that were coming in, but it was still causing lots of civilian casualties. Now, that hasn't disappeared, but what has appeared is that the Ukrainians who had for the longest time kind of held their positions but not done anything back to the Russians have started sending their own drones and their own missiles into Russia. And they're not trying to kill civilians, but they're trying to disable the Russian economic war machine. And what that means is that these drones are blowing up oil refineries, they're blowing up oil export terminals, they're blowing up ammunition depots, they're blowing up trucks that are transporting fuel to the front line. And in doing so, they're causing economic damage that was unimaginable six months or a year ago. And so now we have what I would call an equality of arms situation, where, yes, the Ukrainians are getting hit hard from a civilian casualty standpoint, but the Russians are getting hit hard, very hard, from an economic capacity standpoint. And I believe that this potentially could lead to, I wouldn't say peace, but I think it could lead to a subtle, unspoken agreement that the Russians stop bombing Ukrainian cities in return for the Ukrainians to stop bombing Russian oil refineries.