(LONDON) – The Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is likely not receiving the full details of his army’s struggles in Ukraine, according to a retired senior CIA executive, who also warned that the Kremlin has no reason to negotiate as it believes it is winning.
Ralph Goff, a retired senior executive at the Central Intelligence Agency and an intelligence and geopolitics expert at Cipher Brief, made the assessment in an interview with Frontline. He said it was unusual for the CIA director to be dispatched to Moscow with such a message and noted that Putin did not meet with him directly, instead allowing him to meet with intelligence counterparts.
“I think one of the problems is Vladimir Putin doesn’t get the full details on what’s really happening out there,” Goff said. “I think he gets enough to where he knows that there’s a problem. He ordered them to take all of the Donbas two years ago, and they haven’t made much progress. So he knows there’s a problem.”
Goff said the Russian elections are not a sham but the next best thing, with no legitimate political opposition and all so called opposition figures in favour of the war. He said there are varying degrees of support for the war, but some cracks are starting to appear.
Goff recently returned from Ukraine, where he witnessed a Russian drone strike on a train carrying Western officials returning from meetings in Kyiv. He described his overwhelming emotion as anger, noting that most passengers on the trains were women and children just a couple of kilometres from the Polish border and thinking they were safe.
“It was annoying for civilians there who have to endure this every day,” he said. “Terrifying. Here I am, I can come and go as I please. They are stuck there. They have to deal with this literally day and night.”
Goff, who visits Ukraine every three or four months, said he found a dichotomy on this trip: optimism at the front where soldiers are holding on, and pessimism and doubt more to the rear. He travelled with General David Petraeus and other members of his delegation to the east to meet with commanders.
He noted more explosions taking place in Kyiv, not just at night but during the day, with the Russians hitting the capital around the clock. At the front, he said Ukrainian forces are dug in and have adjusted well to a new style of warfare, inflicting horrific casualties on the Russians, to the tune of around 40,000 a month. They claim a kill rate of about one to eight and have goals of expanding that to 50,000 a month and a one to ten kill ratio.
“In the rear areas, cities are being pounded relentlessly by the Russians,” Goff said. “Their goal is obviously to undermine civilian morale and support for the war. That’s not going to work. It didn’t work during the Blitz. It didn’t work in Nazi Germany. It hasn’t worked anywhere really. These types of assaults on the civilian population generally tend to have the opposite effect, generating anger amongst the populace and defiance.”
Goff said there was more pessimism in the rear on this trip because of the non stop attacks, and everyone is dreading the onset of winter. He said strikes have included energy infrastructure, train stations, train lines and increasingly airports.
He said the strike on the train he witnessed was a clear message, noting the Russian Geran 5 drone took out a locomotive but did not hit passenger trains or kill anyone. There were strikes nearby at the border where there were injuries at a gas station, which was also a diplomatic crossing point. He said this was the first time the Russians have struck the critical rail line from Warsaw to Kyiv.
“Boris Johnson and Carl Bildt and some other European leaders had been there a few hours earlier, and then we were travelling with David Petraeus and some others,” Goff said. “They were clearly not looking to kill them, because frankly, I think if they were, they would have succeeded. But they definitely were sending a message that this line is no longer safe.”
Goff, 67, explained his history with Russia. He joined the army at 18, scored high on a language test and became a Russian linguist in the US Army, listening to the Soviet group of forces in Germany with signals intelligence. He later studied Russian and German at university and has worked against the Russians for his entire adult life.
Asked about Russian strikes near the Polish border, Goff said he does not believe things are on a precipice but part of a transition. He said the Russians have been conducting grey zone operations and kinetic activity in Europe for years with very little response, and Putin has not been held accountable for actions such as using Novichok against defectors in the UK or attempting to murder political opponents in the Russian Federation.
“He is testing,” Goff said. “He is looking to see what are the limits of his behaviour. Putin is not crazy. He is very pragmatic. He is maybe divorced from reality somewhat because he is so isolated, but he is not crazy and he keeps probing and testing. I am not in the school that thinks he is preparing to attack a NATO country. I think he will be more subtle than that.”
Goff said a mistake the West has made for years is saying Putin is at war with NATO but NATO is not at war with Putin. From the Russian perspective, NATO is and has been at war with Russia, and in his mind these attacks are legitimate responses to what he sees as NATO’s activities in support of Ukraine.
Asked whether Europe has woken up to the threat, Goff said the further you get from the front, the more the perspective changes. The Baltics have dealt with this since 1991, the Nordics are now on board with Finland and Sweden in NATO, and Eastern European former Soviet satellites feel the pressure. He cited the drone incident at Leipzig airport, which woke the Germans up, leading to the expulsion of 150 Russian officials and their families.
Goff said Europe is beginning to wake up, at least the political leadership and parties concerned about Russia, and support from Europe to Ukraine continues. Asked whether Ukraine can find a solution to its air defence shortage, he said people should be worried but not panic, and now is the time for Europe to double down in technical and monetary assistance.
He noted Ukraine recently announced a defence budget hole of about $27 billion (approximately £21 billion), which needs to be filled. He said he is surprised the Ukrainians allowed a gap where they have been successful intercepting propeller driven drones at an 80 to 90 per cent rate, but with jet powered drones the rate is far lower and they are getting through. He said ballistic missiles are not their fault, as the technology was mostly in Western hands and everyone has used up their Patriot interceptors. He described this as a failure of Western governments four years ago to recognise the industrial scale of this war.
“The Russians have a sustainable long term capability to pound Ukrainian cities and infrastructure with missiles, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and jet powered drones,” Goff said. “The West is going to have to do a lot more to close the gap.”
On the drone arms race, Goff said the rule of thumb is that software is upgraded every two weeks and hardware and firmware every six weeks. He said the focus is moving from innovation of drones themselves, whether air, sea or ground, to the introduction of autonomy into systems, including semi autonomy and full autonomy. He said in the future there will be drones sitting in ambush that trigger themselves without humans behind them and hunt their targets.
“We are not quite in Skynet territory, but it is coming,” he said.
Goff said the most disturbing part is that for years the West has underestimated Russian ability to innovate. He said the Russians have always had the capacity to scale up faster than the West, and they have a wartime economy. He expressed full faith that the Ukrainians will close the gap on jet powered drones, but said that gap should not have been there in the first place.
On Ukraine’s long range capabilities, Goff said medium strike capability has been crucial this summer for stopping a pincer movement plan the Russians had around the fortress belt. He said on this battlefield you cannot show your head or move, and it is turning into an underground war. He said the medium strike capability has been absolutely essential to prevent the Russians from bringing forces and supplies up in any kind of size.
He noted a big part of this is that Ukraine can use Starlink within Ukrainian territory but not over Russia. He said they will have to develop alternative methods of navigation, which they are working on, and they need Western help with that. He said this is what has kept them in the game on the front, causing chaos and havoc behind the lines, noting three Russian generals were killed in the last month or so.
Asked whether Russia may be reaching a frontline culminating point, Goff said he does not know if it is a culminating point so much as another transitory point where they start adopting different tactics. He said the main tactic now is infiltration of troops in ones and twos going to the front, and when visiting commanders at the front, they have watched numbers of Russian soldiers infiltrating and getting intercepted by drones and killed.
“It is astounding that they keep doing it, but they keep doing it because it works,” Goff said. “If you are Putin and you do not care how many troops get killed, you can keep using this tactic.”
He said there will be a return to a form of manoeuvre warfare that incorporates drones and counter drones, and whoever gets there first will have an advantage. Asked whether NATO leaders have learned enough about drone and counter drone warfare, Goff said absolutely not. He said General Petraeus travels to Ukraine for fact finding, not war tourism, meeting commanders from the front to the command staff in Kyiv, looking at lessons learned and how to bring those back to Western militaries.
He cited war games in Estonia or Poland where a large NATO force gets a bloody nose from a small Ukrainian drone force, showing Western forces have not yet adopted this. He said it is not enough for a US military to say it will incorporate more drones into each battalion. He said the full chain must be established with a drone unit at platoon, company, battalion and regiment level up to corps level, which is what the Ukrainians have done. He said Ukraine has transitioned from a brigade style command structure to the corps structure, and bigger payoffs will be seen with that change because they are bringing technology along with it, which the West has not done.
Asked about the CIA director’s visit to Moscow, Goff said CIA directors have a history of getting involved in intelligence diplomacy. He noted former director Burns went to Europe and Kyiv before the war in autumn 2021, warning that the Russians were coming, but in some capitals he was politely received and in others dismissed. He said President Zelensky himself did not want to believe the Russians were coming until they were. He said Director Ratcliffe delivered a warning on his first visit, but these warnings are empty unless backed up with something, and this one was not backed up either.
Goff said he thinks the introduction of Director Ratcliffe into the process of negotiating with the Russians is being looked at, and there are rumours he may step in to replace envoys Witkoff and Kushner, which would be a welcome change on all sides except maybe the Russian side.
Asked whether negotiations would change, Goff said nothing will change. He said Putin at this point in time does not have any reason to negotiate as he feels he is winning and does not care about casualties. He said there are signs that some sort of mobilisation is on the way, and Putin has a careful exercise of threading the needle on how much he can mobilise without creating political opposition. He said frontline commanders acknowledge that if the Russians are successful and can mobilise 400,000 to 600,000 more troops, they will be hard pressed on the front to hold that back, which is why they are trying to create more casualties on the Russian side.
“At present, they can hold that off,” Goff said. “But if there is a mobilisation, and there is no reason for Putin to turn it off at this point, if he can do a gradual mobilisation so that you end up with another 300,000 or 400,000 troops here without domestic unrest in Russia, then that will be a problem for Ukraine.”
He said there is no indication Putin is planning an attack on the Baltic states or Poland, and he cannot even cross the Dnipro River right now, so he has his hands full in Ukraine.
Asked about the Russian elections and whether Putin should have heeded warnings from the CIA director, Goff said Putin probably did not need to heed them but should take them into consideration. He said it is very unusual for the CIA director to be dispatched to Moscow with this type of message, and unfortunately Putin did not meet with him directly. He said one of the problems is Putin does not get the full details on what is really happening, though he knows there is a problem. He said the elections are not a sham but the next best thing, with no legitimate political opposition and all so called opposition in favour of the war. He said some cracks are starting to appear, and a new sanctions package approved by Congress, if signed by the president and enacted, would be another heavy screw to turn on the Russians.
On the new US sanctions bill passed on Wednesday, Goff said it is a step in the right direction and shows European allies that the United States is not entirely out of the issue, but Europeans need to continue to step up. He said Putin gave the Ukrainians a bloody gift by invading them and giving them their identity. He said before the war Ukrainians were a little fuzzy on their national identity, but they are no longer.
He said Donald Trump gave Europe a gift by suggesting the United States may not be there to back them up, forcing them to do it on their own. He said there have been increases in defence spending and defence production, particularly with the Germans, and they must follow that trend line and continue it. He said between that, the sanctions and the performance of Ukrainian troops on the front line, there is a chance to force some sort of negotiation process to resume.
The interview was conducted by Frontline, produced by Times Radio.
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