The Duran Podcast - Russia drone and missile superiority overwhelms Ukraine air defense

Episode Date: October 19, 2025

Russia drone and missile superiority overwhelms Ukraine air defenseThe Duran: Episode 2366

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the military situation in Ukraine, and perhaps in this video, we can focus on the situation in the sky, Russia's dominance of the air war. The fact that Ukraine clearly does not have any more air defense missiles or air defense systems to counter the Russian drone and missile strikes. and the blackout situation in Ukraine. We had an interesting development a couple of days ago where the electricity in major cities

just kind of went out. And this time around, it wasn't because of a specific Russian missile strike or drone strike. It just seems like the grid is not able to cope anymore because of all of the continuous subsequent missile drone strikes over the past couple of weeks and couple of months. It now looks like the entire grid, at least in major cities, including Kiev, is just starting to crumble.

This story isn't getting as much attention as it deserves because people are still focusing very much on the situation on the ground. And rightly so. And by the way, the narrative that the Ukrainians are holding back the Russians, we recently did a program about this. It is not true. And since we did that program, there's been more military developments and the crisis for the Ukrainians on the front lines is worsening. But let us indeed focus on the situation, the war in the sky, as I've called it, and which is intensifying. The Russians now conduct missile and drone strikes against Ukraine either every night or every other night, but it is continuous. This is much bigger air offensive than the ones we saw in previous years on a much, much bigger scale. Ukraine's air defense has completely collapsed. The very latest drone missile strike that took place just before we made this program is unique in one important respect that the Ukrainians

themselves admitted that out of the 24 missiles the Russians launched, they weren't able to shoot down a single one. All of the missiles got through. Previously, the Ukrainians have claimed that they shot down 80, 90 percent of the Russian missiles. Now, even the Ukrainians have to admit that all of the missiles get through. And of course, we also have the drone strikes that take place, the Gerard drones. There's been a very revealing article in The Guardian of all places, which spoke to people on the Ukrainian air defense, and they admit that they're finding it increasingly difficult, virtually impossible to shoot down the drones, that they're just too many of them, that they fly too high, that they fly too fast, that they engage in diving attacks,

that they're very small targets that are very difficult to detect because of all kinds of things. And the drone offensive is also in combination with the missile offensive. It's worsening Ukraine situation. And the point is that these two things, the drones and the missiles complement each other because the missiles do the big damage, but the drones do the continuous damage, and because the Russians use so many drones, they don't have to use so many missiles in a single strike. And that means that the production of missiles in Russia, which has apparently increased sixfold, it means that because they're not using so many missiles, missiles in each strike, they can just keep pounding Ukraine with missiles night after night

in ways that they weren't able to do in 2022, 2023 and 2023, and 2023, and in previous years. So this is turning into a complete disaster. And apparently Ukraine's gas system has collapsed. It's lost its ability to produce natural gas. This being a former Republic of the Soviet Union gas was essential for heating as well as obviously for industrial use. And as you rightly say, the electricity system is buckling and starting to break down. And the transport system is starting to break down as well because for the first time, the Russians are now going after the railway system, which they tended not to direct. directly before, but they're able to attack trains and railway lines and then railway stations,

and that's causing major problems there as well. So it is a general crisis and Ukrainian officials are talking about a very, very hard winter ahead for the Ukrainian people and much harder than any winter that Ukraine has faced before. And this time, there is no prospect of air defense missiles coming from the West in anything like the quantities that would have been needed to at least mitigate the effect of this Russian air offensive. To the extent to which these Western missiles were ever successful is questionable, but at least people could pretend that they were, and at least they were coming. Now, they're not coming, and even the Ukrainians are accepting that those that they do have aren't succeeding in shooting down Russian missiles or drones

in the way that would be needed. So it is a disaster. What happens when the Russians get to the point where they can send a thousand drones a day, which is what many people expect them to do in the near future. I mean, you know, right now it's every couple of days. You'll get a big drone strike of, say, 400 to 600. And you have drone strikes every day. Ukraine is also sending drones into Russia, by the way. And not at the numbers that Russia is sending.

But they are sending drones into Russia, and they're trying to knock out Russia's energy facilities. And they do hit Russia's energy facilities, especially across the border areas. But what Russia is sending right now is doing so much damage, and it's not what many analysts expected to be in, say, two to three months,

or say, four or five months where many people are thinking that Russia will be at a point where they can launch a thousand drones into Ukraine every single day. I mean, that's going to decimate. Ukraine's and energy facilities, it's railway, everything. Yes.

I think a point that needs to be made about Ukrainian drones, because you're absolutely right. The Ukrainians do regularly launch hundreds of drones into Russia, but they are generally smaller, and they come in many different varieties, and some of them are able to travel longer distances. Some of them are unable to. They come with smaller warheads,

all kinds of things. They are not uniform and sophisticated in the way that the Russian drones are. They're not usually as big and as powerful as the Girand drones are. And they don't come in, you know, with the sort of technological packages that some of these Girand drones do. So, I mean, some of them are guided drones. Some of them use jet engines. Some of them are able to conduct, you know, big diving attacks. As we know, there are lots of decoy drones that also accompany the drones that do the attacking. They are very different. The granular detail of the two drone offenses is very, very different. One is basically a workshop operation. The other one is an industrial one. And that is something that people do need to understand.

Now, absolutely, the Russians are working towards a situation where they can put up a thousand drones in the sky over Ukraine on any particular night all day. The closest we got to that was one particular drone attack that the Russians conducted where they put up 800 drones. But I think that was mostly a test to see how one would coordinate and organize. a drone attack on that scale. Because these drone attacks are meticulously planned and they are tightly controlled. As I said, some of these drones are, you know, use autonomous guidance.

They're, you know, launched and, you know, they have a program and they're told that the program guides them to where they have to go. Others, there are actual controllers back in Moscow who, you know, control them as they conduct strikes. Others have hybrid things. Some of them apparently starting to use AI controls. But whatever, this is a drone strikes which are tightly controlled, very tightly organized. I'm sure that each drone strike has an overall controller who is coordinating, if you like, the various drones, the various drones, the various drone operators, and that each drone strike is planned.

So, you know, if you're going to send a thousand drones against Ukraine, you need an awful lot of planning, and you need to set up planning mechanisms to get it organized and to organize these things effectively. Well, we are absolutely heading to that. And, well, I think this is going to be absolutely devastating. It's going to be a drone offensive and a missile offensive of the like that we have never seen before. The closest analog that I can think of is the bombing offensives over Germany that used to take place during the last months of the Second World War, where again the Allies were able to put hundreds of bombers in the sky over Germany, night after night and day after day and cause enormous damage.

It will be something like that. And we've never seen that happen before. And when we get to it, well, I mean, I just don't know how Ukraine's industries, such as they are, its economy will be able to continue to function in the face of something like that, or its railway system. Yeah, Ukraine doesn't need tomahawks. It needs air defense. doesn't have any and the West doesn't have to give.

It needs also a plan. I mean, nobody seems to be talking about. I mean, a plan on how to survive a drone and missile offensive of this kind. It needs, if you're going to set up an air defense, you need a planned air defense to make it effective. The Germans, by the way, tried to do. do that. I mean, you know, they were working towards developing counters to the bombers. There's been nothing like that in Ukraine. There's been talk about creating interceptor drones, but that has never happened on anything like the scale that's needed and the Russians for

their part. One of the AI drones that they're looking at are Russian AI drones, which will be sort of fighter drones to attack the interceptors, the Ukrainian interceptors. So kind of robot warfare in the sky, I mean, it's almost extraordinary, but we are actually increasingly, it seems, heading in that very direction. Anyway, the Ukrainians don't seem to have a plan. And I don't get the sense that Zelensky and his people are really focused on this. As you rightly say, Their plan, to the extent that they have one, is always an offensive one. More drone strikes against the Russian refineries, Tomahawk missiles, try to take the battle to Russia.

But of course, they can never do that on anything like the kind of scale that the Russians are doing to them. And the Russians almost certainly will be able to counter these Ukrainian moves, because if If the Ukrainians aren't planning their defenses, the Russians will certainly be planning that. Well, Ukraine said that they want to go on the offensive and they're just writing for Trump's permission. Well, Trump said he's going to green lighted.

He'll take a look at the plans. And then he's going to decide whether Ukraine should go on the offensive, which is an interesting statement to be quite honest for Trump to make. But yeah, I mean, all the reports are that is, all the reports that are coming out is that Zelensky wants to go on the offensive. a big offensive to counter Russia, which I still can't understand how they're going to do this or what this is going to be. But it sounds more like marketing spin than anything else. Well, it is. It is marketing spin. I mean, like the drone offensive against the oil refineries is.

Now, we've talked about this before. I've discussed this many places. I mean, yes, Ukrainian drones get through and hit oil refineries in Russia. and they do do damage. The damage can be very quickly repaired. Again, this is one of the problems because, of course, Zelensky knows nothing about factories. Not as, yeah, Matt. These are people who worked in the film industry. They don't know very much about oil refineries.

I can tell you that for sure. They don't understand these enormous, heavy industrial facilities. You need to pound them every night and every day to be able to. to knock them out of use effectively. It can be done, but it's not going to be done by hitting them with a single drone sporadically every couple of days. That's not going to happen. And the Russians have organized repair teams.

And the drone offensive against the refineries has not had anything like the effect that many people in the West imagine that it has. or that Zelensky himself is claiming. So you're absolutely correct. This is, again, a PR offensive more than a real one. Yeah. All right. Anything else that you want to add to this video?

Well, the fact that there is no obvious counter to this Russian missile and drone offensive against Ukraine, because I said supplying Ukraine with a couple of hundred Tomahawks, if it comes to that, is not going to be able to respond to this. The fact that Ukraine cannot defeat this of drone offensive, that its air defense has collapsed ought to be another reason for negotiations to end the war. And it ought to make it, the Americans, perhaps, who ought to be looking at this, ought to understand that. And they ought to understand that this is the first war that the United States has been

involved in since the Second World War, in which the other side is whitting in the sky. It ought to be something that, you know, the Americans who are, you know, the great apostles at Air War, they ought to be understanding the significance of. Just listen to Kellogg. It just, well, exactly, listen to Kellogg instead. Sorry, go ahead, you were saying, I'm so sorry. But just listen to Kellogg. He'll feel you in.

I mean, that's the point I'm making. I mean, that the Americans haven't grasped this and aren't seeing this is really extraordinary and that the Americans aren't drawing the obvious conclusions from it is difficult to understand. You know, Vance made a statement the other day. I forgot to what channel, one of the mainstream media channels he was being interviewed. And he said that Russia believes it's doing better on the. the battlefield than they really are. And what we need to do is the United States is to make them realize that they're not doing so well on the battlefield than what they think they're doing,

which I found to be a delusional statement, an incredible statement from Vance. But I'm just starting to believe that Kellogg's message has pretty much seeped through the entire Trump White House. I mean, they've got everyone believing this. He's got everyone believing Ukraine's victory. Well, I think he is. And I'll tell you why. I'm afraid that the US intelligence community and the Pentagon, the Defense Intelligence Agency are probably also repeating all this information. This is one of the major problems. By the way, those of us who have lived through earlier American wars are familiar with this.

I'm just old enough to remember Vietnam, and I remember all these optimistic reports that American generals at that time were making about how we're actually winning when In fact, they were losing. I'm afraid that this is recurring again. Enormous numbers of casualties inflicted on the other side, that the Russians aren't making any real progress on the battlefield when anybody who follows things closely would see that they are. And of course, a situation in the sky, in the air over Ukraine, which, as I suggest, is not

be reported on or discussed properly because, well, it goes too much against the Zelenskyy Yermak narrative. So we just go on pretending that this isn't happening and that Ukraine is still winning the war. I'm afraid the Americans have an extraordinary ability, a dangerous ability to fall for the trap of wishful thinking and seeing the optimist. side. You know, it's a society where optimism is always very much a feature of the national psyche. And it plays, it's a good thing, by the way, overall. But it's not a good thing in war. In war, you need to be very, very tough-minded and realistic and understand exactly what's happening. And if anything, being slightly on the pessimistic side works to your advantage.

Well, they're being fed misinformation. At least that's how it looks. that's coming directly from Zelensky himself. I mean, Zelensky feeds it to Kellogg, and Kellogg feeds it to the rest of the White House. That's the way it looks at the moment. And I just find it incredible that everyone is buying this. Well, Ansirski, the Ukrainian military leader is feeding it to the Pentagon, and they, in turn, are feeding it to the other intelligence agencies. Don't they have their own intel?

Well, you know, one would have thought so. but apparently they rely mostly on what the Ukrainians attend. And the result is, as I said, what we see. And the British play a big part in the Ministry of Defense, at least. The UK Ministry of Defense plays a big part in the shaping of propaganda from the Ukraine Ministry of Defense. I mean, they work very closely together. They always have been for a long time. Absolutely, absolutely.

And of course, the British regarded as outrageous. Heresy, whenever anybody suggests that information that's coming from Ukraine could possibly be less than 100% reliable. I mean, I've encountered this myself. If anybody ever suggests in Britain that, you know, the Ukrainians might not be telling the full truth, there is always a very, very strong reaction. So there it is. I mean, you know, people are, all of this is accumulating.

I mean, it's an extraordinary contrast, by the way, to what you get on the other side, on the Russian side. But on the contrary, everybody is talking all the time about the problems and the way things are not being done properly. The Russians lean always towards pessimism. And in war, it works to your advantage. Yeah. All right. We will wrap up the video there. go to the duran.com and check us out on X and on telegram and on Rumble and go to the Duran shop, pick up some merch like what we are wearing in this video update.

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