School of War - What It’s Really Like Inside Ukraine in 2026, with Aidan Stretch

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

For months, it was conventional wisdom among large swaths of the American right that Ukraine would inevitably have to cede its Donbas region to Russia to end the war. Now, with Russian morale flagging, “that assumption is just no longer true,” says Aidan Stretch, a CBS News international reporter based in Kyiv. Today, Stretch joins School of War to discuss the state of play on the battlefield, Laura Loomer’s recent change of heart about the war, and how drone warfare has transformed the very idea of the front line as we know it. 02:36 - Is Ukraine Really Winning? 05:58 - Political Turmoil in Kyiv 06:51 - The Fedorov–Syrskyi Power Struggle 12:06 - The Protests That Changed Ukraine's Military 13:11 - Why Drapatyi Replaced Syrskyi 14:07 - Meeting President Zelensky 17:42 - Asking Zelensky if Ukraine Is Winning the War 20:00 - How Ukrainian Protests Force Political Change 24:29 - The Power of Ukrainian Civil Society 27:10 - Laura Loomer's Visit to Ukraine 28:50 - Ukraine's Military Innovation 30:48 - How Ukraine's Military Really Works 33:58 - Ukraine's Mobilization Challenge 37:24 - Why Drone Warfare Is Only the Beginning 41:34 - How the Middle East and Ukraine Wars Intersect 44:47 - Reporting From the Front Lines of Ukraine This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the frontline today. Learn more at palantir.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the front line today. Maven Smart System isn't just software you use. It's the platform you build on. Every day, thousands of uniformed service members use AI coding agents to build their own agentic applications across all warfighting functions on top of the DOW's integrated ontology. What once took a contract in a year, now takes a warfighter and an afternoon. Administered by OSWCDAO, powered by the Palantir platform. One platform deployed everywhere at all classifications. Build at the speed of war.

The story of the last few months in Ukraine is one of military success. The perception in the broader world is that Ukraine now has the upper hand in its war with Russia. Meanwhile, in recent weeks, in Kiev, there's been a bit of war. and tremendous political turbulence over some of Vladimir Zelensky's personnel decisions at the top of the Ukrainian war effort. To break down these issues to help us understand the nature

of Ukraine's politics and the issue of tech development in the war in Ukraine, we welcome Aidan Stretch of CBS News. Let's get into it. It is a perspective for war. This Milwaukee invasion of 31, a date which will live

What the experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the grave situation in Iran. It will fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War.

I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Aidan Stretch. Aidan is a CBS News international reporter based in Kiev, Ukraine. He's focused on covering Russia's invasion, humanitarian issues. and diplomacy there. He was a freelancer before that. He was at Yale before that. And Aden, I'm delighted to welcome you here on School of War. Thanks very much for having me. So we're going to we're going to talk about the war, sort of big picture. We're going to talk about Ukrainian politics. I do want to make sure we get to you living the life of a war correspondent for CBS News,

which kind of goes to the lifeblood of CBS News and how it became prominent back during World War II with reporting out of London. So we'll get to all of that. And I think that will be of interest to, you know, we have a largely sort of military and national security focused audience here. And we occasionally have correspondence on, but not that often. It's more a mix of military practitioners, analysts, historians and things like that. But before all of that, let me just ask you, 30,000 foot view, the news for Ukraine and Ukraine's defense of itself against Russia for the last, say, I don't know, three, four months has been net positive. very positive here in the United States to the point where even the president, who will just say was a little cold towards Vladimir Zelensky and the cause of Ukraine in 2025.

Here in the middle of 2026, he seems to be affected on some level by that narrative success. He's had these warm conversations with Zelensky, both here in Washington and in Ankara. Everything's kind of coming up roses in the press narrative for Vladimir Zelensky and for Ukraine. What's the reality? I think there's some truth to all of that in that positive narrative, in particular how it's perceived in Washington. I think the operating assumption in the Trump White House up until about three or four months ago was that Russia will eventually take the Donbass in eastern Ukraine.

And if that's going to happen eventually, why would Ukraine not just seat it now, save everybody time, resources, human lives? And you had seen that sort of rhetoric, at least, appear in leaked conversations between President Trump, Wikov, Kushner, and their discussions with both Russian and Ukrainian envoys. And I think that assumption is just no longer true from a battlefield perspective. So Ukraine, of course, there are still areas where Russia is advancing, and they are advancing in parts of the Donbass, particularly around Constantinifka and Sloviansk. But the idea that this is just a slow advance in which Russia overtakes Ukraine, at least the Donbass, is just no longer sort of a foregone conclusion. And so I think that right there in particular is important to look at for how the White House would perceive the negotiations. I think bigger picture and the thing that gets a lot of attention in the media is Ukraine's deep strikes into Russia because you have these sort of sensational photos of refinery.

or warehouses in flames. And again, there's truth to that. There have been massive successes in Ukrainian deep strikes. They've now knocked out about 15% of the total logistics capacity of Russia's top online retailer, wildberries. They've forced authorities in Crimea to cut off gas sales to civilians. So there's real truth to that as well. But it's not as if Russia's long-range strikes in Ukraine are any less effective. And, you know, the question I think I've actually posed this to you before is, you know, would you rather be living in Moscow or Kiev right now just from a security standpoint?

And I think the fact that Russia still retains the ability to hammer Ukrainian cities with ballistic missiles, it doesn't offset any of these Ukrainian advances, but it complicates this narrative that Ukraine is on the offensive and winning across all of these different fronts. And then, you know, just to layer onto the military conversation that we're having, there's a separate political conversation for all the positive narrative, which has some substance, as you've just outlined, even if the reality's a little bit more complicated, for all the positive narrative about Ukraine's military progress, it's been a, I don't know if chaotic is exactly the right word, but certainly turbulent few weeks for Zelensky and Ukrainian politics at the top of the security. establishment. Walk us through the events of the last few weeks and why they matter. The ousting of the Minister of Defense, the subsequent ousting, the popular young Minister of Defense, the subsequent ousting of the less popular chief of the general staff and his replacement. Just these are all sort of names that may or may not be familiar to listeners. Just help us understand what's going on there. Sure. Yeah, I could start from the beginning here. So you have Mahalo Federov. He, was the 35-year-old Minister of Defense in Ukraine. He took that position in January. He has deep ties to

Silicon Valley and was given an aggressive mandate both in terms of driving some of these technological reforms and integrating them into Ukraine's military, but also shifting things in areas like procurement, mobilization, even the composition of different brigades and where they should be placed, which is something that you would normally think of as the job of the general staff. All of this chafed with the commander, as you said, Alexander Sersky. And there is, I want to pause here because there is this sort of caricature that you'll see where you have, you know, 35-year-old tech-savvy Federov and then the 60-something-year-old Searsky budding heads over Federov wants to, you know, drive these technological reforms in the

military. Sirsky is an old school guy who's resisting them. It's much, much more complicated than that. And that's sort of a caricature that gets at some of it, but not all of it. Let me interrupt because I want to drive in on the complications there before we get to Serski's replacement, because this is important. We actually have to have the time to do that here. So if it's more complicated than just, you know, new wave tech versus old guardways, T-shirts versus blouses, et cetera. What's the caricature and then what's the deeper reality of that debate between the two men? So the caricature is that Fedorov is 35 years old.

He wants to bring in some fancy, whether it's data, applying data to every battlefield scenario and awarding points for different units based on the type of Russian armaments that they take out and do everything based in a way that you would do in an office in Silicon Valley. And then Siersky is 60-something and he wants artillery shells, right? That's sort of the caricature. And then those two, that personality dispute leads to just an unproductive relationship. That's the caricature. And there's probably some truth to that.

The reality, and it's a bit complicated, but where I'd start from is that Ukraine's Ministry of defense is a behemoth, right? They oversee the procurement of weapons for Ukraine's military. They oversee mobilization. They, again, they oversee implementing these different technological reforms. And the way one Ukraine unofficial put it to me is if you have this giant and calcified body that's in charge of so much that's important for the country, it's kind of like an oil tanker that's sailing along and you want to make it do a 90-degree turn. So you want to change. So you want to change, which companies are awarded contracts. You want to change where specific brigades are on the battlefield and the type of people.

They're composed of. And that's what Fedorov was trying to do. And so it's not just that he had these sort of specific technological reforms that chafed with the general staff. It's that he was tasked with completely reforming a ministry that is giant and very hard to move. And so it's not that he was necessarily set up for failure. He had made a number of really important reforms at the margins. But there were a lot of different interests beyond Siersky that, you know, that stood in his way of doing that.

So you had the sort of, you know, the big drone companies that receive most of their contracts. They were upset after he changed those ways. And so the reason why I point out that distinction is that it's not like you can just replace these two men as President Zelensky did and then end up in a situation where this oil tanker has now steered 90 degrees and is now going in the right direction. So one of the sort of jarring things for outside observers, you know, from the point of view of Washington, you know, was Federov, was sort of the popular figure here. Sersky, I think, encountered skepticism in many circles. You know, perhaps there's just sort of less appreciation of the complex underlying

realities that you're just describing there. But Serski's replacement now seems to enjoy a very good reputation internationally and here in the United States. So, you know, Fedorov's out, which surprises everybody in the battle between Fedorov and Sersky. I think most international observers assumed that Zelensky would back the apparently more popular guy for reasons that Maybe you have some inside knowledge as to exactly what Zelensky's calculus that was there, but Fedorov loses that internal power struggle. He's out. People take to the streets, very vibrant Ukrainian domestic politics. So then the appearance certainly is, and you'll tell us if it's the reality, Sersky had to go in sort of response to that domestic political pressure,

and then replaced by this interesting figure. Tell us about that. Well, first, just on the protest, I mean, you're exactly right. The chance in the streets were literally, it's in Ukrainian, but the chance were Siersky is the devil, Searsky has to go. That was, you know, you'd hear that in the streets just as much as you heard at Federov's our guy or some other chance supporting Federov. And so you're right that there was this very, it was a very unpopular decision from President Zelensky to remove Fedorov.

And then, of course, a week later, as you said, he backtracked and removed Siersky instead. Serski's replacement that Selensky chose Mahalo Drapati, he is, as you said, extremely popular in international audiences. I spoke to one American official while this was all going down, and it was before Drapati was actually announced. And he said that if Siersky were removed and Drapati were put in his place, even if Fedorov never returned to his position as Minister of Defense, he would still be more optimistic about Ukraine's chances on the battlefield than before this entire upheaval. And the reason he said that in other military analysts, I've said this as well, is that Drapati was somebody who was seen as an ally of Federov, seen as somebody who backed these reforms, and he was doing a pretty good job implementing it into the conventional military.

So not just these elite drone brigades, but your rank and file soldiers and units. He was doing a very good job integrating the reforms there. He was also just has a record of success. It was leading operations in the Harcieve region up and around Kupianzsk for the past eight months or so. where there was enormous success leading in a Ukrainian counteroffensive that liberated Kupiyat. So the military analysts and foreign audience who are watching all of this, of course, Fedorov was very popular with them, but they're very happy to see Mahalo Drapati now in charge of the general staff and Sirsky out. Have you met Drapati, by any chance?

I haven't, no. Yeah, that'll be interesting. He's a fascinating figure. I know you have met Zelensky. I know of at least one occasion, maybe there are more, but tell us about the time you, a diligent correspondent that you were. You were early to the scene of a terrible Russian ballistic missile strike there in Kiev only. I don't know if you preceded him or arrived to discover, but one way or the other, you got there fast enough to encounter Zelensky himself.

It was definitely more fortuitous correspondent than diligent correspondent. We were just, as you said, doing a live shot. That reminds me, Aiden, of a famous line of Napoleon's who's being challenged that one of his field marshals, whom Napoleon favored a competing field marshal complained to Napoleon that that guy was just lucky. And Napoleon responded, well, I like generals who are lucky. So there you go. Maybe less of a line between those two things than we might think. Whichever the case, I'll take it because I did get to meet him.

And it was interesting and worthwhile experience. he showed up to the site of a apartment building. It was a nine-story apartment block that had been nearly completely leveled by a ballistic missile the night before. He had done this a couple of times, Zelensky had going to these sorts of sites. We didn't expect to see him there. There's no sort of news of his arrival. And as you said, there weren't that many other media there at that moment. It was sort of a low in the day when he did come.

One of the things that I just found very interesting, speaking to him in the backdrop of this ballistic missile aftermath, is you don't get many opportunities to speak to the president of Ukraine and ask him questions. So I was trying to fit them all in. And it wasn't just like, tell me about what's behind you. It's when was the last time have you talked to President Trump's envoys? When was the last time you, what's the update on getting ballistic interceptors? And the one thing that he did continue to focus on is just the human element of everything. I mean, this is an opportunity where he's on American television. He can lobby for Patriot Systems, Pact three interceptors, the things that Ukraine needs.

He can tell Trump the things that he wants to persuade him of. And he did some of that. But he spent most of his answers speaking about the people who were lost in the strikes overnight, the destruction behind him. And mainly just encouraging Americans to come and see for themselves the destruction that these missiles cause. And I think it was just, it was an interesting moment because, you know, he's a politician and I'm asking him diplomatic questions. But there are some, you know, there's just a moment where you are standing in a spot where 30-something people had lost their lives the night before. And that's something that he, you know, goes through and looks through every single week.

And so there is just this bizarre dissonance between standing there and asking him about, when was the last time you had this negotiation with American officials and, you know, the bodies that are still being carried out of these buildings. And so definitely, you know, an interesting time to be able to catch him and ask him questions, but also just a reminder of, you know, what this war can really be like. And the question I remember, and the one that got played on CBS for the next 24 hours or so, was you asked him if Ukraine was going to win the war. Do you remember, can you characterize his answer for us? I think I asked him, is Ukraine winning the war?

Is Ukraine winning the war? Okay, got it. And he, I mean, and he actually kind of smiled at me when I said it because he knew what I was getting at. This was a moment, as you said, where a lot of the analysts have said Ukraine is now winning the war. A lot of outside observers have said Ukraine is winning the war. You don't hear anybody prominent in Ukraine saying that they are winning the war. And what he said is it's hard to talk about winning any war, right? You're looking behind him at the destruction. That's not winning to him, even if you're seeing material advances on the battlefield.

What he did say, though, is that he believes Ukraine will win the war, that that's a, that in his mind is a foregone conclusion, which I think is a, pretty strong statement because Ukraine, you know, Ukraine winning the war means a lot of different things to different people. It could mean retaining their sovereignty. It could mean Kiev still being free after this war. For most people in and around Zelenskyy, winning this more means regaining the territories that Russia has taken throughout it. And so he, of course, didn't specify what exact, what definition he was talking about. But it's interesting that he did say, in my mind, Ukraine will win this war. There's no doubt about it. Yeah, I remember admiring the

exchange because it was a very clever question, and I thought his answer was pretty masterful. Actually, I have the unreconstructed view of, well, fairly uncomplicated admiration for Zelensky. And, you know, one thing I wanted to make sure to ask you about was to reflect on just the nature of Ukrainian politics and his role and sort of the level of accountability, such as it is built into the system for him right now. Given the absence. of elections, which, you know, was fattish here in the United States, certainly on the right for a couple of years, you know, first of all, to be critical of Ukraine and second of all, to sort of draw this equivalence between Zelensky and Putin.

But I actually think this episode over, you know, Fedorov losing this power struggle, but then Zelensky coming under tremendous pressure and then relenting in the face of that pressure. I mean, this is a sequence of events that literally couldn't happen in Moscow because the existence of the kind of protest would be a direct threat to Putin's hold on power. I mean, Aaron, I don't know if that could happen in the United States, right? Interesting. Okay.

Well, say more. Could you imagine people taking to the streets and saying that Pete Hegseth should be fired and then Pete Hague sets gets fired? I mean, I don't like, this is a, this is just civil society in Ukraine works in a very particular way, which is, as, you know, these protesters put it to me, they only take the streets when they want a clear outcome and they usually get that outcome. This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, administered by OSW CDAO, powered by the Palantir platform. Maven isn't an app.

It's a builder ecosystem. Right now across the joint force, thousands of uniform service members are pointing AI coding agents at their hardest problems and building the tools they need themselves, targeting workflows, intel products, battle management. No ticket, no vendor, no wait. The warfighter closest to the fight is now the one building for it. That's how you fight at the speed of war. It's totally fascinating because you're right. You're right. I mean, in the United States, I think for different reasons than in Moscow, it wouldn't happen.

You know, the notion that you would take to the streets with a specific political outcome in mind, believing actually that if you have your act together and you get organized, you might actually achieve that specific outcome. And that's somehow part of the process here. Yeah, that's not really, it's not a factor. There's a lot of protests in Washington. They don't work like that. And then, of course, in Moscow, a true authoritarian regime, it would be a completely different story.

If it even happened, it would be presumably violently suppressed. And in Ukraine, it happens and Zelensky does back down or relent or attempt to address the concern. And then life sort of goes on. So it's a fascinating form of democratic politics, even absent the elections for now. And to answer your original question about how it serves as accountability for the president and how Ukrainian politics actually work. I mean, when I first got to Ukraine, it was a year, it was pretty much a year ago. And the protests then were over Zelensky's decision to essentially

handicap his, what were supposed to be independent anti-corruption agencies. And it came out later that he was doing so to protect some of his very powerful allies. People swarm the streets then and immediately, you know, within a week, he had reversed course and those anti-corruption bodies retained their independence. And then I remember in November when the news of the corruption scandal actually broke. And it implicated a number of Zelensky's very close allies. So Timor Mindich, his former business partner, his energy minister of the time, they were all implicated in a really awful scheme in which they had basically skimmed, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars off of energy contracts that were meant to shore up the country's

critical infrastructure during war. And so it's kind of as bad as a corruption scandal can get. And I remember asking a Ukrainian journalist and her friend who's a Ukrainian military veteran, why aren't we seeing more protests now? I mean, everybody was really mad about when he, went after these anti-corruption bodies in July, why are people on the streets now? And they said, you have a complete misunderstanding of how protests work here. In Ukraine, we protest because we want something to change and we believe that it will. And right now, we believe that despite all of his

imperfections, President Zelensky is still the one to be leading this country. And so we're not going to be out on the streets calling for him to step down. And so we're not going to protest at all. There's no change that we can actually make. And then, of course, the opposite was true after he fired or moved aside Minister of Defense Mahalo Fedorov because there was action that you could take, right? And then again, you see him backtrack a week later and fire the unpopular commander of the armed forces. And so there's all sorts of imperfections in this system, particularly during a war. But when we're talking about democracy and civil society, it doesn't get more democratic and you don't have a leader more accountable to the people. then when he does something that's grossly unpopular and people take to the streets,

he's forced to reconsider and backtrack within a week pretty much every single time. How does this sort of hive mind effect occur where there's this formulation of a crisp objective for the protesters? Is there a sort of civil society network of organizations that are conferring at an elite level? Is it just these protest movements are only sparked when the outrage is sort of so obvious and big picture that there's really not much. discussion needed, people sort of independently come to the same obvious conclusion. Like, how does it actually function? So Ukraine has a very vibrant and structured civil society, probably at a scale unlike many other countries. And this really goes back to 2014 in the Revolution of Dignity when Viktor Yanukovych, who was a pro-Russian leader who essentially got in the

way of Ukraine's efforts to integrate more with the West in the European Union and was perceived as cutting a deal with Putin behind the public's back. People, you're of course familiar with this history. People came out into the streets. There was violence. There was months of protests. And eventually, he was ousted and replaced. And that civil society never went away. So those groups of lawyers, of journalists, of anti-corruption bodies, of activists, they still meet and talk about these things and have for the past decade. And so they're a extreme base of power in society. And the reason, you know, I can't get inside President Zelensky's head and say why he makes the decisions that he makes. But I can tell you that these people have a lot of

power in Ukrainian society. And I think the evidence of that is that when they speak out and when they organize these protests, President Zelensky always listens. And it's not as if you had violent protests against the removal of Mahalo Fedorov. And they were big, but they weren't that big. You're talking about thousands of people in different cities across the country. You're not talking about tens or hundreds of thousands swarming the presidential palace. And so it's more. It's more. of a sort of tacit agreement between the president and these different leaders of civil society that say we understand what is in the interests of a democratic and free Western-leaning Ukraine. And as long as you adhere to those and don't cross our red lines, then we won't be out in the streets.

And then when he does cross them, they will be and the repercussions are clear. Fascinating. Really, really fascinating. Perhaps this is the kind of thing Laura Lumer saw when she was on the ground there in Ukraine a few days ago, led her to change her mind. I don't know if you've been following that whole subplot or or had the chance to encounter her when she was in the country. I mean, it's fascinating. I don't know if she's particularly interested in Ukrainian protest culture. But I imagine she's met some of the people in Ukraine that I or any other American have

met when they've gone there, which will tell her things like all of the things that you love about the United States. those are the things that we want here, right? We want to be able to speak. We want to be able to continue to speak our minds. We don't want to be Russian. We don't want to be Belarusian. We believe in these freedoms and we're fighting for them.

And so all of the things that people in the United States perhaps take for granted, Ukrainians would say that they're fighting for those things. And so, you know, I think that's certainly a powerful message to any American who come. and visits there for the first time. I also think, you know, Lumer, a lot of what she did while she was there was speaking to religious leaders in and around Kiev. And I think she found, you know, a lot of strong Christian voices there who had a bone to pick with Putin's narrative that this is somehow some Christian crusade that seems to have

captivated some areas of the American right. I think when, you know, someone like her goes and sees these things, there's just a completely different reality. So let's go back into the complexities of Ukrainian military practice and the sort of clash of cultures within it. Because this was something when I was in the country for a few days back in February that was really, really striking to me. I mean, as somebody who had been following the war from the outside, the narrative that one sort of confronts is Ukrainian innovation. the sort of democratization of the employment, even innovation of technology on the battlefield, the sort of, you know, the future of war being worked out in real time in this laboratory of a battlefield in Ukraine. And by the way, that's all true.

But all that coexists, exists in tension with, sort of collides with a military system and infrastructure that in certain respects is still half with the old Soviet army. to the point where, you know, the more senior officers are actually products of the Soviet Army. They, you know, went to, went to Soviet Army schools and were officers in that army in their youths. And then on my third hand, you know, there's sort of a third layer of a kind of unit-based system where the units themselves have ties to Ukrainian politics, civil society. The occasional oligarch is a source of funding. They're fundraisers in their own right. It's a bit like, you know, in the American Civil War, different regiments getting raised in different states and having their own sort of bases of support. So you have the sort of innovation story, which is real. You have the old guard Soviet story. And then you have the sort of just infinite complexities of Ukrainian politics, all creating a military situation that is just unlike anything that we have regular experience of in the United States.

You know, what do you think people miss about the reality of how all these forces are interacting that if they were in your shoes actually talking to people day to day, they would appreciate better? Well, one point that you just made is that rather than talking about one general force, you're often talking about different fiefdoms or individual units that get resources on a particular basis and operate maybe even closer to businesses than a conventional military structure. I mean, one way to kind of visualize this is as you're walking through the streets in any major Ukrainian city, you'll see billboards recruiting to the military. But your billboard will never say it's not like in the United States during the Second World War where you'll say, you know, come, come join. Uncle Sam wants you to fight for us, right?

It's not the Ukrainian military recruiting them. It's particular units. And they all have a very particular personality, what they do, vibe. So you'll have one unit, say it's HARTIA. This is infantry. Infantry Corps. They will have a guy wearing a beanie in a sweatshirt with a remote control. And it'll say, tired of your job, come drive a tank with Hartia instead.

And you'll go to a different billboard. And it'll say, come join Azov and Kill Russians, a different slogan. And so all of these different units and brigades and corps have different fundraising bases. It's funny. I was actually on a social media page of one of them recently. And it had on its Twitter page or X page a number of different open positions. And a number of them were social media editors for that particular brigade. aid. And so they develop these, you know, these very vibes is kind of the only way to describe it.

And reputations that helps them these particular units recruit really talented, primarily drone pilots, but all sorts of different soldiers with different talents. And then that, of course, as you said, clashes with the general military structure, which has real severe manpower shortages. I mean, And the other thing that it's important to appreciate now is how mobilization has changed in this country. And there are roads that I used to be able to walk down, no problem, going from work to my apartment and never see a military officer. And now I'm stopped there at a checkpoint and asked for my documents along with all of the Ukrainians walking there. And that's a testament to, and a lot of parts of the conventional military in Ukraine, there are severe manpower shortages and efforts to, to mobilize. more people have not always gone smoothly.

And the amount of course clashes with these sort of individual units that are oversubscribed. So I think you describe it perfectly when you say you have this big military clashing with these new, innovative, flashy units that are both doing a good job. But there's just not that many of them. Say more about the mobilization issues because this is obviously one of the major nine questions of domestic Ukrainian politics. And it intersects with the tech issue, right? Because the whole nature of what's going on at the Ford line of troops, one of the key elements of it is that the automation aspect of what's happening at the battlefield does reduce the manpower demands.

And yet, it is a major war covering, you probably know the number out the top of your head, but however many, you know, thousands of kilometers of frontage, you do need manpower, not only for the front lines, but for all the back area stuff, up to the extent that the back area is even a thing anymore in Ukraine. Say a little bit more about the controversy, about the willingness of Ukrainians to fight about this sort of strange phenomenon of the age range that is pressed into service. Just give us a bit of an orientation to that issue. Well, I think there's two important different ways to think about the manpower issue. One is the people who are already in the military. And one thing that Mahalo Federov did when he became Minister of Defense is he began this

audit, which Tripati is now continuing, to see which units are really effective? Are there units out there that are basically just sucking resources and men, but they're not doing anything quantifiable? So he introduced different mechanisms of and introduced different ways of collecting data to see how effective those different units were. This was one of the things. things that clashed with Siersky and other members of the general staff. But he would do things like, say, introduce a point system where units are now, the number of resources that goes to a unit is now somewhat dependent on how many Russian tanks or air defenses or soldiers that particular unit is taking out.

So there's one aspect of it, which is you have the people in the military already. How are they being allocated to the most efficient way? then the other aspect of it is in getting after draft dodgers and getting people kind of off the streets, military-aged males who are, you know, don't want to serve or trying to leave the country, making sure that those loopholes are closed. And that was another thing that Fedorov was very aggressive about. And when I, you know, when I speak about these new checkpoints that popped up all over the place, you're near my apartment near different places that I typically went, it was very. visible. You could see people getting pulled off the streets or somebody gets off the metro and they're mobilized. And so you have, you know, you essentially have two different issues here. You don't have enough people in the military in general. And that's the mobilization issue

across the country where you're going out to regions with officers essentially asking people for their documents and pulling them off the street. And then you have the issue of allocating people who are in the military most efficiently. Well, keep your passport and your credentials on you. Otherwise, you know, as you find yourself somewhere east of Kharkiv, carrying a pack. So let's shift gears here to the tech aspect of the battlefield, which you have been covering. It's been a major theme of your reports out of Ukraine for these last several months. You know, there's sort of at least two elements of the story.

one foreign support, American tech support for the Ukrainian war effort from American firms, directly from the U.S. military, across a whole range of things. The weapon systems themselves, reconnaissance platforms, data. And then there's the sort of reverse direction. There's the story of Ukrainian innovation and what it has to teach us and the world. You've seen that sort of subplot featured very prominently in the war against Iran with counter-drown. tech out of Ukraine, suddenly being in demand. Maybe talk about the balance between those two things. The role that foreign and especially American support is playing in Ukraine's tech innovation.

And then what is sort of indigenously and authentically Ukrainian that the rest of the world needs to be paying attention to you? One thing I appreciated about what you just said and you're reporting on and your commentary on this in general is you mentioned the word drone very few times. Because I think there's a conventional wisdom here that the relationship between Ukraine and the U.S. is or should be Ukraine makes a lot of drones. The U.S. doesn't make very many drones. They're sure to be some sort of symbiotic relationship there where the U.S. starts helping, where Ukraine starts helping the U.S. make drones. And it's just, you know, that's really only the tip of the iceberg.

because it is true that Ukraine expects to make 10 million drones this year and the United States made something like 300,000 last year. And so there is certainly this idea that Ukraine will be Ukrainian factories, supply chains, engineers will be helping allies, including the United States, get better at building some of the cheaper platforms like FPV and fiber. optic drones that have been used on the battlefield in Ukraine. But when I talk to American investors who are interested in looking at Ukrainian companies, or I talk to American companies that are in Ukraine interested in partnering with Ukrainian companies, I rarely hear them talk about drones from a hardware perspective at all. So what they're mainly interested in from the American perspective is electronic warfare systems, communication systems in GPS denied environments.

The data, you mentioned the data, which is a huge thing. You have executives from Palantir coming to Ukraine and saying things like the AI revolution. Kiev is much more central to the AI revolution than Silicon Valley from a military perspective. And people are like, what does that mean? It's because to train these models to make them work the way that they need to be able to work, The only way that you can get this is battlefield tested data. And that's what Ukraine has and the United States doesn't. And so just as sort of a top line answer to your question, from Ukraine going to the U.S.,

I think the simplification is that it's about drones and it's about cheap drones. But the things that are actually valuable is the data, it's the software, it's the thing inside the drones. It's the things allowing the drones to talk to one another. and then it's the teams of people. So even the companies that are investing in that even the American and Western entities that are investing in partnering with Ukrainian companies, they're not interested in buying a few thousand first person view drones. What they're interested in is the team of engineers who know not only how to produce those, but know how to adjust them and modify them whenever they need to.

Because as we see on the battlefield in Ukraine, a platform that works on. one day, a week later, we'll need seven different changes to it to make it work then. And so it's this investment in human capital that's also really important. Again, goes far beyond just the hardware of the drone itself. So one thing I'd be remiss in not asking you about, just because it's so timely, is the role in which the war in Ukraine, and in particular the strikes on energy targets, and to an extent the maritime war itself, especially in the Black Sea, but you could argue some of these Ukrainian strikes in places like St. Petersburg in a way are also contributing to a maritime campaign that affects the Baltic. But in combination with what's going on in the Middle East,

where you have the street of Hormuz heavily restricted to the point of being closed unless you're under direct U.S. They still don't say escort, guidance, something like that. The Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandeb having an extremely restricted passage right now. And now in the Black Sea, this raging battle with both sides. trading blows going after each's ability to supply itself with critical commodities, including energy, and certainly Ukrainian strikes designed to prevent Russia from, you know, refining products, exporting refined products. Talk a bit about the state of play there and the complexities of it. Again, I mean, from the outside, the story has largely been, look at these amazing Ukrainian

mid and deep range, especially deep range in this context, strikes. And that certainly is part of the story. But what are the Russians doing to hit back? And what is the net effect on the global economy? Well, one clear way you can see this is that in some ways these wars are starting to merge. I mean, I don't want to overstate it, but there was a recent incident over the last week in which a Ukrainian drone hit a Iranian commercial vessel that was believed to be taking Russian military cargo from Iran to Russia. And so, you know, I think you're exactly right that there is no way to separate what's going on in Ukraine and Russia from the war in the Middle East. Speaking a bit more broadly about deep strikes and the impact it will have both on the war and both countries and the global economy, I mean, one thing you're just seeing on both sides is an expansion of the targets that are now in play. So over the last, this is now the second week in which Ukraine has been hitting warehouses that are owned by wildberries, which is Russia's version of Amazon.

They've knocked out 10 to 15 percent of the company's total logistics capacity. And they've shown no signs of slowing. And this is a major international online retailer. And then Russia, again, as you said, has been doing the same thing to Ukraine throughout the war, hitting boats that are taking grain throughout, through the Black Sea to other places, hitting energy infrastructure, hitting Nova Posta, which is Ukraine's biggest mail company, logistics. And so, you know, a lot of this war, as some of the fighting on the front has, it's not a stalemate,

but it's slow moving. A lot of this war has come down to, you know, hitting targets on both sides. sides that are meant to sustain their war economies. So let's conclude by talking about your own personal experiences here as a correspondent in Ukraine. I suggested at the start of our conversation that, you know, you're relatively new to CBS News as am I for that matter. You know, do you give much thought to the legacy of which you're a part here?

I mean, this is a news organization that sort of really comes to prominence because of Edward R. Murrow reporting from London during the Nazi bombing there in the early 40s. And here you are in Kiev. It's been a particularly intense few months there. Just reflect, if you would, on the task that you've got and the tradition that you're a part of now. I'll leave the comparisons between me and Edward R. Murrow to you. But I will say, I mean, I do feel fortunate is an odd word to use when describing reporting reporting. from a war zone, but I do feel very fortunate. And the one thing that I do think I need to call attention to is the fact that there are

less and less networks that are sending people to do things like what Edward Armuro did. And there's all sorts of different reasons for that. And some of them make a lot of sense from a safety standpoint or a resources standpoint. Right. But one thing that people are very surprised to learn is that there are very few full-time American TV correspondents in Ukraine. In fact, I don't want to, you know, you'll have to fact check me on this. I'm not sure if there, if CBA, if anybody other than CBS has a, if any other American outlet other than CBS has a full-time presence there. And, you know, that's not a decision for me to make or really even cast judgment on. But what I can say is that the things that you learn that shape your understanding of a place by intimately being there and living with the people and in hearing their stories from day to day, not when you go and interview them for a particular purpose, but when you go to the coffee shop after a night of ballistic missiles and you ask the law. woman working there what it was like to sleep in a bathtub with her baby, you just have a

different perspective of the country. And of course, it's not the same as being a local. I'm speaking to you from London right now where I'm able to rotate out to every few months. And so it's very different, of course, than being somebody who lives there full time. But there is something, I think, special and different about being able to really be of a place, experience it intimately, and then try and communicate what's happening to there, what's happening there to people that, you know, don't have the same opportunity or the same time to go there and experience it every moment there in the same way that that you can. And why do you think that is the lack of deployment of correspondence? Is it just, you know, general financial tightening across the board? Is it, I mean, there is a specific factor with Ukraine, right, which is, it's just not easy to get in and out of the place. Whereas, you know, Israel. you know, the Gulf, you know, relatively a lot easier to get in and out of, say, Qatar than it is Keeve, where you can't just fly in. I mean, it's not like air traffic never gets interrupted in the Middle East. Of course, it does. But as a general rule, you can figure out how to make your way in and out with some reliability. It's just not possible in Keefe. You got to go by ground one way or the other.

Well, I don't want to speculate about, you know, why some places decide to have people there permanently or send people in or not. I don't have the answer. of that. I mean, it does just take so long to get there. I traveled home to the U.S. for the first time since I moved to Ukraine about a year ago. I traveled home to the U.S. in May, and it took me something like over 30 hours. So, as you say, I have sympathy for people who are not, you know, looking forward to making that trip every few weeks. But again, I will, you know, I think stand firmly with the case that there are just some things that you learn and begin to understand about the place and also what you don't know about the place that you can really only get by living there. Adenstretch, CBS News, international reporter based in Kiev,

though enjoying some well-deserved R&R in London just at the moment. Thanks for making the time to come on School of War, and I hope we'll continue to check in from time to time. Thanks very much for having me, Aaron.