EASTORA REPORT | A Russian drone hit the locomotive of a train parked beside David Petraeus’s as he was leaving Ukraine. Both trains had been evacuated. The former CIA director could not say whether the strike was aimed at foreign visitors. His broader concern is how much longer Moscow can keep fighting.
In a SpyCast interview, he offered a stark measure of Russia’s strain: an estimated 1.5 million troops killed or wounded since the full-scale invasion. That would exceed U.S. military casualties in World War II. The figure is difficult to verify independently, but Britain’s top military officer has given a similar estimate.
His more immediate concern was the rate of loss. According to Ukrainian estimates he cited, about 46,000 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded in September, while Moscow recruited roughly 30,000 a month. These figures do not establish exactly how many troops Russia can field, but suggest a gap if the trend persists.
“There is a point at which he cannot recruit the additional soldiers that would be needed,” he said of Vladimir Putin. Replacements are not necessarily ready for battle, either. Ukrainian forces, he noted, had captured men who had joined Russia’s army less than two weeks earlier. He called such troops “almost human cannon fodder.”
On the other side of that calculation is Ukraine’s effort to make the war more expensive. Strikes on Russian refineries and supply facilities have added to economic pressure. The former general defended those targets as lawful, although the legality of any attack depends on its military purpose and the risks to civilians.
He contrasted those operations with Russian attacks on civilians and abuses in occupied areas, citing Bucha, torture and the transfer of Ukrainian children. UN investigators have separately concluded that Russia’s forcible transfers and deportations of children constituted crimes against humanity.
He wants Western governments to give Kyiv frozen Russian state assets, adding financial pressure to battlefield losses. He did not predict an imminent peace. Instead, he raised a harder question: could Russia eventually find the cost of continuing greater than the c