CIA Director Visits Moscow As Ukraine Stares Down a Dangerous Winter

**Sarah Holder** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. So Marc, over the past few days, Russia has escalated its attacks on Ukraine. Last night was the sixth straight night of bombardments on Kiev.

**Marc Champion** (0:18)
Right. It has been a pretty dark period now for the Ukrainians.
It's only in the last year that they've actually had capacity to strike back at Russia in the way that Russia is striking them. And so they've become really quite successful in hitting targets, embarrassing targets close to Moscow in a way that has forced Putin to rethink how he's going to execute the war going forward. And he has decided to escalate. And the other part is that the Russians are producing more ballistic missiles and more cruise missiles than at any time before during the war by multiples. And the Ukrainians have run out of Patriots, which are the only missiles that they have really, that are capable of bringing down ballistic missiles. So you have that advantage which President Putin absolutely wants to exploit this winter. And at the same time, you have a decision in Moscow that the United States is not going to deliver Ukraine to them on a plate.

**Sarah Holder** (1:27)
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, Bloomberg Opinion's Marc Champion joins me to unpack the latest on the Russia-Ukraine War, how Europe and the US are positioning themselves as Russia escalates its attacks against a depleted Ukraine.
What does this all, Russia's capabilities, Ukraine's dwindling defenses, suggest about the state of the conflict right now, and where things could go from here?

**Marc Champion** (2:02)
The conflict has always had two theaters. There's the air war and there's the ground war. And the ground war, it's been a bad year for the Russians, a relatively good one for the Ukrainians. So the Russians have really been able to move at a rate much slower than the trench warfare of World War I.
So it doesn't get much slower than that. They've also taken enormous casualties. The Ukrainians were able to deploy drones, new land drones, all kinds of new technologies that the Russians have taken time to catch up with. There's a cycle here. So eventually the Russians do catch up and they have their own developments. So it won't always look this good for the Ukrainians. And indeed, I think this winter is going to be pretty tough all the way across the board. Russians themselves, ordinary Russians, are now much more exposed to the war than before. They know it's a war, not a special military operation as Putin called it. And at this point, as he escalates, Putin is considering, we don't know if he'll do it, but he is considering another major mobilization of forces towards the end of the year.
That would get him to about 300,000 extra troops by the spring. These are things that are quite worrying for the Ukrainians because they can't do that.

**Sarah Holder** (3:23)
So the director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, paid a visit to Moscow last week, and the visit has been described as secretive, mysterious. This doesn't happen every day. What do we know about Ratcliffe's trip?

**Marc Champion** (3:39)
We don't know exactly what was talked about. There's been lots of different reports saying different things about whether he did or he didn't see Putin, etc. But from the response of the Baltic states, he visited them as well. It seems pretty clear that he went to tell the Russians that you need to think really hard and long before you take on NATO.
There's been a number of reports coming out of the CIA. Obviously, the CIA doesn't get on a pulpit and say this stuff, but there have been reports from sources within the CIA basically saying that the Russians were contemplating some kind of test of NATO. And that is very plausible because it's already happening in hybrid form.
You know, increased numbers of airspace penetrations by Russian drones in Romania, Moldova, in Poland, and in other places in the Baltic States. And then also with a number of sabotage operations that have either taken place or have been foiled. One in particular in Germany where an armed drone was found at the airport from which the planes leave from Germany to get weapons to Ukraine. And it's been very interesting listening to the BOLSKers. On the one hand, they've made it clear that those were the concerns, but they also said, this doesn't mean that anyone thinks that Putin's about to line up troops outside of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, wherever, and then march them across the border. He's far too engaged in Ukraine to be able to do that, and he has many other tools with which to test NATO. So it's consistent with a lot of evidence that the Russians have decided that there is clearly a framework in Russia where it's now understood that Europe, and within that the UK, are now enemy number one, and that they need somehow to put pressure on the Europeans if they're going to end a war on their term.