Former CIA director David Petraeus has concluded that Russia "no longer has the upper hand" in its war against Ukraine. The retired four-star general reached that assessment after his 10th visit to Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, including meetings with frontline units last week.
"Over the last two months, the Ukrainians have actually made greater incremental gains than have the Russians," Petraeus told CBS News in an interview in Kyiv, as "Hvylya" reports.
That assessment might have seemed unlikely given Russia's advantages in manpower, firepower, and economic scale. But Petraeus argued that Ukraine has offset those disadvantages through innovation in unmanned systems. The edge, he said, lies not in drones themselves but in the system built around them - what he described as an "overall command and control ecosystem" integrating surveillance, targeting, and strike capabilities.
During a frontline visit, Petraeus watched Ukrainian drone operators engage a Russian target in real time. He said that being spotted on this battlefield without immediate access to deep cover is effectively a death sentence - a dynamic that has reshaped ground combat along a wide zone near the front.
Ukraine now controls a deep strip along the frontline where Russian forces are under near-constant observation, according to Petraeus. That level of exposure has fundamentally changed what Russia can and cannot do on the ground.