Transcript: Ukraine's high-tech war of attrition, with Christopher Miller
Ian Bremmer:
Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are talking about the evolution of the war in Ukraine, a conflict that has redefined how nations fight and how civilians live. When Vladimir Putin launched his full scale invasion in 2022, tanks rolled across the border, artillery pounded cities, soldiers advanced in columns. But more than three years later, the war looks very different. The battlefield has shifted from the ground to the sky. Russia is sending more powerful drones in larger numbers into Ukraine every day. Putin has reoriented, Russia's military and its entire economy to create an industrial drone powerhouse, eroding Kiev's early advantage. The threat spilled over into NATO territory in mid-September when Poland used expensive fighter jets to shoot down cheap Russian drones in its airspace, a dangerous escalation that has European leaders worried that their militaries are losing ground to Moscow's technology advances.
If 20th century warfare was defined by tanks and missiles, Russia's invasion has made it clear that the 21st will be about unmanned vehicles. In the next phase, autonomous AI-powered swarms. Here to talk about what this war has become and how drones have changed life on the front lines, as well as in Ukraine's cities, I'm joined by Christopher Miller, he's Chief Ukraine correspondent for the Financial Times. And he's lived and reported from Ukraine for 15 years. Let's get to it.
Chris Miller, welcome to GZERO World.
Christopher Miller:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Ian Bremmer:
You've been spending a lot of time, more than just about any Western journalist on the ground in Ukraine, not just since the war has started but, I mean, since the precursors to the war have started, right? Talk a little bit about how your experience of the war is changing, how Ukraine's experience of the war is changing?
Christopher Miller:
Sure. So I've been in Ukraine for 15 years, so as you said, even before, not only Russia's full-scale invasion, but it's covert, illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Ian Bremmer:
2014.
Christopher Miller:
And the first war under the guise of a separatist uprising in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, that summer. It's changed dramatically. First of all, just the sheer scale of it, right? Russia allowed itself plausible deniability by not officially launching an invasion in 2014, but using its covert secret forces and separatist proxies to foment this war that raged for years, but at a smaller scale and in Eastern Ukraine. Fast-forward to 2022, what we saw was the first major land invasion in 80 years. And so that brought in, officially, Russia into the war. And we saw mechanized forces, heavy artillery, air forces used early on. This was a regular, conventional war.
That has since changed even more dramatically. And what we see now is a ground war where infantry are stuck in positions for not days long or week long rotations, but months. I even know some Ukrainian soldiers who have been in positions for nearly a year. And that is because we are looking at a high-tech war with artificial intelligence, drones, new swarms of drones, all types of robots, essentially, being used to wage war alongside these other conventional means.
So, in some ways, this war looks like the second world war or even the first world war. If you zoom in and you look at the trenches and the bunkers and that type of warfare, right? There are heavy artillery systems that are being used that were used in the Afghanistan war in the '80s. But there are now, with great prevalence, tens of thousands of drones in the air at any given time in Eastern Ukraine and Southern Ukraine being used by both the Russian and Ukrainian armies. Now, that has changed everything, the way war is fought, the fact that now we're only seeing small infantry forces of three to five on the Russian side advancing very slowly and methodically.
Ian Bremmer:
3 to 5 individual soldiers.
Christopher Miller:
Individual soldiers. So your viewers will recall these long snaking lines of armor tanks at the beginning of the war, dozens of soldiers advancing across the battlefield. Now it's sabotage units of three to five guys at once. And this is done because of the prevalence of drones. So nothing happens on the battlefield now that isn't seen by both sides' surveillance drones as well as these FPV, or first person drones, that you've got a soldier 5, 10, 20 kilometers behind the front line-
Ian Bremmer:
Who's operating these drones.
Christopher Miller:
Who's operating these drones and viewing [inaudible 00:05:38]-
Ian Bremmer:
Which is essentially a virtual soldier.
Christopher Miller:
Of course. They're using a VR headset and they're sitting there looking at a computer screen, and that's the way in which a lot of these soldiers are viewing the war now. But because of the prevalence of these drones, you can only get these small groups of soldiers sort of penetrating areas in the front line. Now that means that, of course, Russia's taking huge losses. Anything larger than these groups of three to five soldiers would-
Ian Bremmer:
Get blown up by Ukrainian drones.
Christopher Miller:
Exactly. Exactly.
Ian Bremmer:
Because they can see them.
Christopher Miller:
Exactly.
Ian Bremmer:
Right, cover.
Christopher Miller:
So this is a war of attrition now, and the battlefield in Eastern and Southern Ukraine has seen some changes this summer, but very slowly, right? Russia's not advancing like it did in the first days of the war when it swept in and took bigger cities and went for hundreds of kilometers from the border of Crimea through Southern Ukraine. Now it's inch by inch, meter by meter.
Ian Bremmer:
How far from the front lines is it possible to live as a civilian on either side given that nature?
Christopher Miller:
Well, it is determined by the length of the fiber optic cables that are attached to many of the drones that are being used now, or the ranges of the FPV drones that are being used, right? So the Russians have drones that can fly 20 kilometers, 30 kilometers, 40 kilometers. I've heard that they're experimenting with some that might be able to fly upwards of 50 kilometers. Now that's much larger than just a front line area that is the width of numerous cities. It could be the length of a road that spans two major cities in Eastern Ukraine.
So I'll give you two examples right now. There are two cities that Russia has in its sights. One is called Pokrovsk, and the other is called Kostiantynivka, and both are in Donetsk Oblast in Eastern Ukraine, which they have illegally annexed, but they don't occupy, correct? Yes. Putin claims these areas all the way to their administrative borders to be Russian territory, even though they don't control them completely. And they want these cities very badly. Trying to take them is difficult because these are urban environments, urban warfare is slow and plotting and grinding and bloody. And so what they're using in conjunction with these drones are large aerial bombs that are equipped with wings that can fly in and destroy giant city blocks. So that's making life hell for the people who live in these cities. Which used to be populated each tens of thousands, 60,000 to a 100,000 people. Now there's a few thousand, or in some cases a few hundred people.
Ian Bremmer:
Living in these cities.
Christopher Miller:
Living in these cities. And it's hell for them because if they are to leave, there is this constant buzzing of drones. The prevalence of drones is everywhere. These drones dictate the movements of soldiers, life in these frontline cities. When I visited the frontline city of Kherson example, where the Russians have, for more than a year, now systematically hunted not only soldiers in their vehicles and on foot, but civilians at markets, on their bicycles. And so at the Financial Times, we published an article about how the Russians were hunting down these civilians and filming them doing so and then publishing their own videos on their telegram channels and boasting of this. So that's what life is like for the Ukrainians on the front line, and also why we've seen this mass exodus from Eastern Ukraine to the rest of the country and this flood of internally displaced people, and also more broadly, the millions of refugees that now have arrived in Europe and even the US.
Ian Bremmer:
And it's why, I mean, you were in the early stages of the war, 2022, 2023, spending a lot more time on the front lines than you are now. I mean, you're just not capable of reporting anything given that nature of conflict.
Christopher Miller:
That's exactly right. The prevalence of drones in the air make it almost impossible to spend any significant amount of time in the open in Eastern Ukraine. I'll give you a quick example. Just a month ago at the beginning of August, I was meant to embed with a unit in Eastern Ukraine and go into the city of Kostiantynivka. I used to live-
Ian Bremmer:
How big is this unit you were going to embed with-
Christopher Miller:
The unit itself? Probably a couple of dozen guys. But it's probably-
Ian Bremmer:
And what was the unit comprised of?
Christopher Miller:
The unit was comprised of drone operators, infantrymen. It's part of a larger part of a larger brigade that has been operating in Eastern Ukraine. So I was going there with the intention of understanding what the front line situation was in Kostiantynivka after it really became a more serious target of the Russian army.
Ian Bremmer:
One of the two cities that Russia is now trying to grab.
Christopher Miller:
That's right.
Ian Bremmer:
Right, okay.
Christopher Miller:
So we had sort of mapped out this plan. I would arrive nearby, I'd get picked up in an armored vehicle with two or three soldiers, and we would zip into Kostiantynivka, and I would spend some time in this command and control center where I'd be able to monitor the front line and their activities [inaudible 00:10:48]-
Ian Bremmer:
Is it in a government building, is it underground? Where's the center?
Christopher Miller:
Most of these command and control centers are in basements of partly destroyed buildings, abandoned schools, abandoned factory buildings. There's a lot of industrial buildings in Eastern Ukraine.
Ian Bremmer:
But in that regard, safe from drones?
Christopher Miller:
Correct. Relatively, relatively speaking. From aerial bombs, not so much.
Ian Bremmer:
Not so much.
Christopher Miller:
Heavier artillery, but from drones, more or less. The real danger from drones is being out in the open. So we had mapped this path that I would ride with them through the city, and then the situation changed completely overnight. The Russians managed to move forward just a few kilometers, but that put their drones within range of the entire city of Kostiantynivka. So they said, "We're going to have to postpone this for now. Let's see if we can do this when get back, when you get back in Ukraine after a break." So when it makes it impossible almost to move around freely, certainly, and it makes it a requirement to jump through all sorts of security hoops to actually observe and report on this war, which is a dramatic change from 2014 when we could very freely cross the front line. Drones were not used as bombs.
Ian Bremmer:
Take a step back from the front lines into the rest of Ukraine because, of course, much of the reporting that we are seeing on the war in Ukraine is about longer range missiles, artillery bombs, and the rest that are being used against Kyiv, against Lviv, against major cities across Ukraine where civilians are targeted as well as critical infrastructure and are getting killed. Clearly the Ukrainians at this point have some relatively sophisticated air defense capabilities. Most of these are not getting through, but some are. We're almost four years into this war at this point. What's day-to-day life like? How is it different when you are spending a lot of your time in still what one would call an active war zone, right?
Christopher Miller:
I have an apartment in the Capitol, Central Kyiv, and along with the other 4 million residents of that European Capitol, I go to bed every night anticipating there to be another air attack. They've become much more frequent this year in 2025, we've seen Russia launch not only in greater frequency, but also in greater scale, these attacks using Iranian supplied and designed drones, attack drones, numerous types of missiles including ballistic missiles. The Ukrainians are really only able to shoot them down using the American supplied Patriot weapon systems. And so we go to bed anticipating these attacks and like clockwork, usually between 10:00 PM and midnight, there'll be an air raid siren. Everyone in the city has their own kind of personal plan. My friends who have children, they run across the street to a bomb shelter, to the metro systems, which were designed after World War II to be bomb shelters-
Ian Bremmer:
Atomic [inaudible 00:14:01] strikes.
Christopher Miller:
Myself and many others, we don't have bomb shelters in our buildings, so we sort of curl up in our bathrooms, and everyone who doesn't have a bomb shelter has learned to live by this rule of two walls. Which is try to, if you can, place yourself behind at least two walls, one to take the initial impact, the second to take the shrapnel and debris from that so you won't be badly injured. And then, of course, inevitably these attacks happen and you can hear the buzzing and whirring of these attack drones, huge reverberating explosions from the missiles.
And then we don't sleep much and we get up in the morning and we look outside and we see the destruction wrought by these aerial attacks. That might mean 20 people killed on one day. It can mean 40 people injured the next. And then, of course, there are the attacks on energy infrastructure and other critical infrastructure. Right now that's a big focal point on the Ukrainian side as we head into the autumn and winter seasons. So it's from the front lines to Kyiv all the way, as you mentioned, to Lviv and Western Ukraine near the borders of the EU and NATO, it's a war zone.
Ian Bremmer:
So a lot of support for the Ukrainians right now, particularly from Europe. And that doesn't seem to be in any way winding down going forward. But hard to imagine how much longer the Ukrainians are going to be able to stand up given what they're facing. Not to say they're not courageous, not to say they don't care about their country, but this is just grinding, grinding attacks on the population at large and on a dwindling number of healthy men over 25 that it's hard to call up as reserves. We saw the first major demonstrations against Zelenskyy because of this anti-corruption body. They overturned it given that pressure and given international pressure. But still nobody wants to see those sorts of things happening on the ground in Ukraine. If you look forward, how resilient do you think the Ukrainians can continue to be?
Christopher Miller:
You covered a lot of ground there. Yeah, look, I know the Ukrainians to be incredibly resilient and they know themselves to be, they're also astute observers and readers of Western media, and they follow very closely what our leaders in the West say. And one of the things that they've noticed is that a lot of people in the West like to say, "The Ukrainians are so brave, they can do anything and look at them, stand up to what was believed to be the second most powerful military in the world." But they're getting tired of being framed that way and talked about in that way. Many of my friends and soldiers tell me, "We're not superhuman. We are the second part of that, human, just like you. We die, we bleed. There are fewer of us than there were three and a half years ago."
So you're right that there is a manpower problem. The Ukrainians are very well aware of that. It is a very painful issue. It's not popular to lower the age to mobilize men under what the current mobilization minimum is, which is 25 right now. And so Ukraine's army is getting older, of course, they're becoming fewer with every new Russian assault, every new attack, it's getting harder to mobilize enough men for the fight. At the same time, the Ukrainians understand this is an existential. There is a sort of mantra that has been spoken by the Ukrainians since 2014, and that is, "If Russia stops the war, there will be peace in Ukraine. If the Ukrainians stop, there will be no more Ukraine."
Ian Bremmer:
No more Ukraine, [inaudible 00:18:04] hear it all the time.
Christopher Miller:
I do think that that's more or less accurate, right? If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their country is going to look completely different than it does today, than it has for the last 30 years following its independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That is what they're fighting for, right? Progress. They've made incredible progress, not only in the past 30 years, but especially since 2014. The irony is that Russia and when Vladimir Putin talks about the root causes of this war, what he's talking about is the perceived creeping eastern advance of NATO and Ukraine becoming a vibrant democracy, more closely aligned with the Western world and Europe than with Russia.
He actually was much closer to that goal in 2013 and 2014 than today, and because of his own doing. He took Crimea by force. He started a war in 2014. He launched Europe's biggest war since the second World War, and that has brought two new members in to NATO. It's pushed Ukraine closer to the west, made it more of a vibrant democracy than it was prior to then. And so his goal is to bring it back in and the Ukrainians understand that. That is why there's an existential element to this. Putin is not going to stop.
Ian Bremmer:
If you're Putin and you see that he can take the losses clearly in terms of his own population, he's not showing a great deal of concern about that. But the amount of time it's taking him to get very incremental gains on the ground in Ukraine is growing, is growing, and the impact on his own economy is getting more substantial, including the ability of the Ukrainians to take a lot of Russian refining capacity off the table. And some of that is Ukraine's own internally developed weapons, right? They have these Flamingo weapons now, for example, that are built in Ukraine that can hit Crimea. They didn't have that a year ago.
Christopher Miller:
An impressive long range drone program.
Ian Bremmer:
Long range drone program, which they're ramping up at global scale, right? I mean, I've heard a million a month is where they want to get in short order. So if you are Putin, and I understand that you don't have any direct special insights on that, but you are spending your entire time professionally on the ground, is there a sense that these soldiers are at some point also... Is time necessarily on Russia's side here, is that the way that it is perceived?
Christopher Miller:
That is the way it's perceived. I think that's right. Perhaps not forever. I don't think that he can continue the pace, the scale of the war that he's currently waging for many, many years to come. But certainly in the short term, we're talking months, six months a year, possibly upwards of two years, I think he can continue to wage his war as he is now. Taking territory isn't the ultimate goal for him here. He takes territory and he uses the ground offensive as leverage. He can dial it up and down. He can order his troops to move forward in Donetsk Oblast or in the Southern Zaporizhzhia Oblast and make it more difficult for Ukraine, right? Apply more pressure on Ukraine. We saw this ground offensive align with all of these flurries of summits with Trump in Alaska, and between Zelenskyy and the Europeans and the White House, these are all happening against the backdrop of the Russians scaling up their air offensive and their ground offensive, right?
So these are tools of leverage. Ultimately, what Putin wants to see is the destruction of Ukraine as a sovereign independent state, and he wants to damage Europe and NATO as a cohesive security structure. And so the people, his soldiers, as you mentioned, they matter much, much less for him, right? He still is able through recruitment, by promising large salaries and bonuses to get 30,000 plus soldiers every month to sign up. He hasn't had to mobilize soldiers except for the one time, I believe, in autumn of 2022. Should he need to do that, I think then there might be a little bit more domestic pressure on Russia. It's true that its economy is not great, but it's not overheating and they can continue prosecuting the war, I think, for at least several months, if not a couple of years. This is also what the Ukrainian military and military intelligence believe and have told me.
Ian Bremmer:
Now, I want to give you at least a little time to talk about the diplomacy, since that's what you've been focused on of late. There's a lot more talk about a ceasefire, not that the Russians are accepting it. A lot more talk about Zelenskyy potentially meeting with Putin, the Europeans, the Americans, a coalition of the willing, a lot more talk about security guarantees. Do you think that we are meaningfully closer to a diplomatic breakthrough today than we were, say, six months ago?
Christopher Miller:
No. No. I don't think we're any closer. And the simple reason is because Putin has not been made to be put in a position where he is forced to negotiate an end to this war. We're seeing Putin go out and say publicly, be very clear about what his goals are, and those goals have not changed or shifted at all since 2022 when he launched his war. We saw Putin recently in Vladivostok say, "The root causes of the war still need to be addressed for there to be lasting peace," right? Those root causes, again, are the issues around his perceived view of NATO expansion eastward, Ukraine's democracy and sovereignty. He wants to see a leader in place that he can control, right? He doesn't want Ukraine to exist as an independent country. He is only ready to sit down at the negotiating table and negotiate away Ukraine's independence and sovereignty.
And he's said that. He's not provided any serious concessions. We hear Donald Trump go out and say that he has managed through his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who's met Putin five times in Moscow now, concessions in this war, and either through misunderstanding, miscommunication, misinterpretation, or pure naivete, Steve Witkoff has come back and said that Putin is willing to concede some territory. Putin himself has come out and said he's not willing to do that.
So I don't think that we're any closer to a sustainable ceasefire, let alone a lasting peace because Putin's positions haven't changed, and until his position does, we're just not there yet. I think it is good that we're seeing the Europeans discuss a coalition of the willing to try to get more specifics or more specific, rather, about what they're willing to provide, should there be a ceasefire and a lasting peace, right? Boots on the ground, intelligence on the part of the United States, air defenses, right? Those are all crucial things that Ukraine will need and it will be great to get those guaranteed in writing should there be a ceasefire or a lasting solution to this war. But that's not going to happen until more pressure is applied on Vladimir Putin to get him to negotiate in earnest.
Ian Bremmer:
And that pressure as of right now, is being applied primarily, and only ineffectively, by the Europeans, in your view.
Christopher Miller:
Correct. I mean, I think the Europeans can do much more, but I think the real pressure should come, and probably will need to come, from the White House, from the United States, and the Trump administration. Which has been, of course, hesitant to do so, right? We've heard Donald Trump level threat after threat of new harsh sanctions and against Vladimir Putin if he continues to prosecute his war. We've heard Donald Trump air his grievances about feeling as though he's being led along by Putin and being frustrated about these attacks on civilian areas that continue.
Ian Bremmer:
But so far no impact.
Christopher Miller:
But so far what we hear from Donald Trump is, "I'll think it over. And in two weeks time, several days from now, soon, I might have to take some action." But so far these have been empty threats. And Vladimir Putin, of course, knows that.
Ian Bremmer:
Chris Miller, thanks for joining the show.
Christopher Miller:
My pleasure. Thank you.
Ian Bremmer:
That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you do. Why not make it official? Why don't you rate and review GZERO World five stars, only five stars, otherwise don't do it, on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Tell your friends-