Russian President Vladimir Putin is running out of time to win his war against Ukraine, amid a stalemate on the battlefield and growing troubles at home, a European intelligence chief has told CNN.
In the next four or five months, Putin “may not be able to negotiate from a position of strength anymore,” Kaupo Rosin, head of Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, said in an interview at the intelligence agency’s headquarters in Tallinn.
Rosin detailed a combination of economic, military and societal pressures facing Putin that could force him to the negotiating table. “Time is not in Russia’s favor,” he said.
A former Soviet republic, Estonia is now a listening post for NATO, and Rosin spends much of his working life analyzing events inside the country’s overbearing and hostile neighbor.
“I do not hear any more talk about total victory. People (in the Kremlin) recognize that the situation on the Ukrainian battlefield is not going too well,” Rosin said, adding that Moscow was losing more men than it can recruit.
In the two years to January, Russian forces advanced at an average of 70 meters (230 feet) a day, with about 1,000 soldiers being killed or wounded daily, according to analysts from Washington DC-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and others.
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Even those miniscule advances have come to a stuttering halt this year.
The Russians are “losing 15-20,000 soldiers a month dead. Not injured, dead,” said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio last week.
In April, 35,203 Russian soldiers were killed or severely wounded, according to the Ukrainian defense ministry, similar to each of the previous two months.
CNN is unable to independently verify the losses from both sides. Moscow and Kyiv refrain from publishing official figures.
Most of the casualties are being inflicted by drones, in which both Ukraine and Russia have invested heavily. Rosin predicts that shift toward drone warfare will limit changes on the front lines.
Currently, both sides are “unable to conduct a massive, mechanized breakthrough” into areas deep in the enemy rear, he said.
The balance between the two sides in drone technology has shifted back and forth as the war has progressed. But Ukraine claims that a new generation of interceptors is blunting the impact of Russian attacks on its cities.
“The share of Shahed drones shot down by interceptor drones has doubled over the past four months,” Ukraine’s defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov said this week.
If Russia wanted to revitalize its campaign and capture the rest of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region – its publicly stated goal – the only option would be “some type of forced mobilization,” according to Rosin.
“If the Russians were able to mobilize another couple of hundred thousand more people to the battlefield, that would be a problem (for Ukraine),” Rosin said. But such a move “would create additional internal stability risks” for the Kremlin, he added.
“They (the Kremlin) are very concerned about internal stability, monitoring it very carefully… This is not the decision they would make very easily.”
Moscow ordered a partial mobilization of reservists in September 2022, seven months after its full-scale invasion began. The mobilization triggered an internal backlash, including protests and a large exodus of men seeking to avoid the draft.
Recruitment has since relied on regional governments offering huge bonuses and other benefits to those signing up, but their ability to offer these incentives has shrunk as Russia’s economy comes under pressure.
The cost of the war, international sanctions and a highly successful Ukrainian campaign against Russia’s vital oil industry are beginning to bite, Rosin said.
Last week, Russia cut its growth forecast for this year from 1.3% to 0.4%, with its deputy prime minister Alexander Novak blaming labor shortages, excessive government spending and Western sanctions.
Ukraine has inflicted “billions and billions of dollars’ worth of damage to the energy sector,” according to Rosin – as Kyiv’s growing arsenal of long-range drones targets refineries, export hubs and pipelines hundreds of miles inside Russia.
Noting a recent spate of drone attacks on Moscow, Rosin said that the “war is coming, war is at home” for the Russian people.
However, it’s unclear how recent developments have influenced Putin – if at all.
“Where is the moment he understands the real situation, because again the Ukraine question is so ideological for him, so it’s probably for him not easy to change the mind,” Rosin said.
Even if Russian troops are unable to make progress, Rosin believes that Putin will persevere.
They “will try to make the next winter for the Ukrainians at least as tough (as) it was (this year), if not harder. If he doesn’t achieve the goal with military means, he certainly will try to achieve his goal via other means in order to have a pro-Russia government in Kyiv.”
But there is a growing sense of paranoia in Moscow, with security around the president tightened amid rumors of coup plots.
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And in Russian society as a whole, soldiers coming home from Ukraine are creating headaches, “carrying back home violence, instability, psychological problems, and crime,” Rosin said. Some join organized crime groups, he added.
A study last year from think tank CSIS estimated that Russian soldiers returning from the war had killed or injured more than 1,000 people inside Russia.
While there may be growing complaints about the war as economic stagnation sets in, Rosin sees little sign of unrest, given the tight control of the security services on dissent.
“I really do not see a street revolution at this point, but sometimes such systems are very hollow inside, and if something happens, it will happen very rapidly, and we all will be surprised,” he said.
