Putin's army destroyed by his own 'Maskirovka' | Philip Ingram

the deceptions come back and as it's got more and more complicated it's actually forced the Russians into position where I don't think Putin is in a position now where he really understands the reality of what's happening on the ground and the reality of what's happening with it with his military because if he did he wouldn't have made the decision to go into Ukraine in the first place hello and welcome to front line for times radio with Me Kate Chabot and today we're talking to a former military intelligence officer with more than 26 years experience with the UK Armed Forces former Colonel Philip Ingram commanded one Military Intelligence Battalion with unique capabilities to identify and monitor hostile intelligence agencies and he's now a military analyst and commentator Philip Ingram thank you so much for joining us on front line my pleasure good to have you here today um you're here to talk about information disinformation and deception from your reading of the information coming out of Ukraine today what is the latest on the Battlefield well from an information disinformation perspective disinformation or the Russians have got a Doctrine which they call maskarovka you know all about masking all about and throwing doubt out there but it's not just the Russians that are doing it the ukrainians are well versed in this as well and uh it's being targeted at effects in the battlefield um but also trying to Target the populations in each of the different countries as well as the International Community and it is the single biggest weapon I think that the Russians are using against the International Community in the way they're doing everything and this is why we see um claims and counter claims and quick statements that are coming out and you know the Russian Ministry of defense is an expert at it you know I I uh whenever I'm commentating refer to the Russian Ministry of Defense as the Russian Ministry of disinformation because most of the time most of the statements that they put out are deliberately um not as truthful as they should be I'll put it that way um and that that's to cause that died that effect I'll ask you a bit more about maskarovka in a moment but can you just tell us what we can actually establish as actually happening in the war at the moment the latest developments yeah in the war at the moment it's it's going slowly as president zielinski said but again this is part of his disinformation campaign he wants the Russians to uh think that it is going more slowly than it actually is the reality is that you the ukrainians summer last year wrestled the initiative back from the Russians having pushed them away from um Keith having pushed them to the east where the Russians had to um uh re-change their main effort into Ukraine and then Ukraine Got a proper tactical um regain of the initiative um by taking a huge chunk of territory back in harkiv in the Northeast and then Harrison um later on the year and kept that initiative going by fixing the Russians around bakmut with all of their attention and a lot of the military effort in there over the winter months giving the ukrainians time to take a lot of their best troops out send them off to the west to be trained on Western pieces of equipment and then redeploy with that equipment and those trained troops that have been away from the front line for a few months back to carry out this counter-offensive that's going on and the ukrainians launched the counter-offensive um a couple of months ago it started slowly with a lot of shipping operations going out into the the Deep Russian areas so drones going to Moscow incursions into a belga groud area um a commander control centers blowing up oil refineries being blown up attacks against Russian shipping and other bits and pieces and it's then moved on to the next stage of that where there's more probing attacks going in on the ground trying to look at how the Russians have put their defenses out and they've had nine months of preparing one of the biggest defensive belts and deliberate defensive operation um that that we have seen since the second world war you know I don't think we've ever come across anything um any military's ever come across anything so well prepared um over such a such a long period of time so it's a very difficult um obstacle for our set of obstacles for the ukrainians to try and break through and that's why they're taking their time probing it looking at it checking the Russian reactions trying to get the Russians to deploy their uh Reserve forces out and whilst they continue to attack into the depth of the Russian areas destroying ammunition dumps destroying fuel dumps attacking lines of communication which are critical for the Russians moving their ammunition and their troops and their vehicles around and the two lines of communication they hit are the main one are railroots and then we've got Road routes and we've seen Bridges attacked and and everything else so the Contra offensive is progressing it's progressing slowly but I would expect it to be doing that at the moment there was always this hope that after the the rapid regain of certain bits of territory last year that ukrainians could do that and but I think that hope wasn't based on the reality of what the Russians have got on the ground and the ukrainians are keeping their powder dry they're attacking on um three or four axis at the moment um one north of bakmut um uh attacking in there with some small gains they're attacking north and south of bakmud to town itself and have progressed uh between 500 meters and one and a half kilometers in certain areas it took the Russians 18 months to advance seven kilometers through backward to capture most of it so the ukrainians are getting some territory back um quite well and then the next attack is just south of um the city of Donetsk um and that that's their access and it's it's down the sort of the Donetsk zaparizio oblast border and a military military terms you always try and find a boundary between things and an attack during that that causes maximum fusion and then the main effort I think is um the Ukrainian is trying to tack down through zaparesia heading towards a Time called talk Mac and talk Mac is one of those hubs for lines of communication but if they can attack through there they'll split this all important to the Russians land bridge from Crimea up into the um the donbass and through into Russia um and at the moment slow progress but um it's building up that picture of what the Russians are doing and what the defenses are on the ground so that whenever the ukrainians do commit their main effort forces they know that they will have a a degree of success rather than just wildly trying to commit them from the outset president zielinski has said that there is evidence of explosives being put on the roof of the zaparisian nuclear plant um is there anything to suggest and he's blaming the Russians for this is it possible to verify this well I think Western intelligence has been repeating that as well so you know I take that as close to verification as possible um president silinski is getting supported by the West not just with equipment and ammunition and finances but also intelligence and the intelligence capability that's been provided in is phenomenal um absolutely phenomenal and you our imagery analysts will have been examining um everything that's going on around zaprasian nuclear power plant the potential for an environmental nuclear disaster is something that will keep all of us occupied and listening into the the communications of the commanders that are around the place so I think we could say with a degree of probability real probability that the Russians have been putting explosives and mining around this operation of power plant and again they did this uh at the uh the dam across the denipro your president zelinski was saying um last Autumn that he got evidence that the Russians were mining the dam um and uh you know we saw what happened to the dam um only a few weeks ago it fits with what the Russians would do so unfortunately I think they are mining it information disinformation and deception are common practice in Conflict how decisive can they be as tools of War oh massively decisive as tools of War um we used to be good at it um if we go back to the second world yeah well yes if we go back to the second world war Operation Fortitude was the operation um operational name that brought together lots of other operations that convinced Hitler that we were going to attack um into Europe through Greece and not through the tour of Italy and attack through the padakalea and not through Normandy and that included other operations like operation mincemeat where there was you know the body of um uh dressed up as a British military major put out of a submarine with most secret plans on it for how some of these attacks were going to go in knowing that they would fall into the German military intelligence um and we were very good at during the second World War World War we created a fake army with fake tanks with fake aircraft with fake Communications with the real commander and and the Germans believed it um and again it's nothing new if we go back to the great ancient Chinese philosopher and general Sun Tzu in his book The Art of War he said and I'm paraphrasing here all warfare's deception all deceptionist Warfare um so it is it is a key part of every conflict the Russians are Masters at it and they have a Doctrine called mascarovka which is all about masking it's all about throwing out doubt and in military terms if you can throw out doubt as to whether um you're stronger here or weaker there you've got this great capability uh and all the rest of it it means that the military planners the other side who are trying to look at countering things are having to try and prove or disprove that information that's out there and the Russians even before um the they reinvented Ukraine this year we're throwing out lots of mascarovka we saw a couple of years ago the new Russian T14 armata tank being paraded in Moscow at um the MayDay parades and everyone was going on about how that tank was a a super tank could destroy anything the West had gotten dollars the reality is it's not very good at all it is extremely unreliable the Russians were trying to get something for their export markets um and it's got no it hasn't been proven in in combat in the slightest um we've we for years have been believing that the the latest Russian equipments have been an awful lot better than they are and that's why we've spent more money on more sophisticated weapons to try and attack them the reality is some of our older weapons our older missiles are proving very effective against the most modern Russian tanks in Ukraine so mascarovka is something and and disinformation is something that's been going on on the on the battlefield and influencing it the whole way through and of course the Russians are doing it the ukrainians are in a unique position because they're you know from the former Soviet Union a lot of their psyche is um and military training and all this is former Russian but they've also been trained on getting their senior staff officers trained in Western staff colleges since the mid-1990s you know I remember going through the advanced command and staff course um number one um at uh it was the old res Staff College at bracknell at the time and one of my classmates on it was a Ukrainian Air Force officer and that was back in 1996 um and you so they're they're in this unique position of having this old Soviet training psyche in what they're doing and therefore deep understanding but but Western training as well and they can combine the best of both does that make them do that give them an advantage then I think it's given them a huge Advantage you know I think looking what Ukraine is achieving at the moment um in reorganizing their um complete military re-equipping their military whilst in whilst fighting a high intensity conflict against what was on paper you're the second best military in the world um and and you're having real successes in it uh as well as you the the learning to fight the equipment all the rest of it they're having to change their Doctrine they're having to change the way they do it um and to to integrate the Western Equipment in and and to to fight it properly I don't think that's something that certainly we in the UK couldn't do um and I don't think even the us could do that in the way it's done so they're giving us a master class in how to um execute high-intensity Warfare um in in in the modern environment and that's you know I'll caveat that with you from a military theoretical perspective it's it's absolutely fascinating but from a human perspective of um on the ground it's it's horrific absolutely horrific and again it's showing how modern weapons the the horrific impact it has on human beings and that's why the casualty rates are just so high and you said earlier that the Russians are Masters at Deception why are they so good and can you tell us a bit more about maskarovka yeah it's it's always been part of a psyche um it's something that they've always done because again you you look at you look at Russia the biggest country by land mass in the world one of the smallest or a a relatively small GDP um a relatively small defense budget but but on paper huge forces so a lot of what they're doing a lot of their influence all the rest of it is within the information sphere um and again when it comes to the the global political influence uh and Vladimir Putin you grew up through the Russian intelligence agencies um it's it's all part of his psyche this um you bluffing and what you're doing and keeping the capability going and manipulating thinking and everything else and he's been doing that um to the west from a political perspective um all of the time and he knows which countries that he can wind up by suggesting there's a greater nuclear threat and he knows which countries he can wind up by getting political influence and he'll combine his information operations with some of this stuff that's going on in the Cyber area some other things that are happening as well and where you get deliberate physical attacks on things um you know for example the Nordstrom 2 gas pipeline or some of the um undersea Communications pipelines that have been cut in in different parts of the world including you know up around the Shetland Islands and various other things so it's it's always been an integral part of Russia's psyche and Russia's operational capability in what they're doing both from a political perspective out into the International Community from a military perspective and what they're doing on the ground um to try and hide things and it's all about masking and hiding um and um from a political perspective into their own population um you know it's controlling the information sphere in their own population so that they can maintain that level of support um for for what's going on by making sure that the story that goes out um is the one that they have control over and which is why generally the Russian people still support Vladimir Putin's efforts into Ukraine and what are the key principles of maskarovka oh the key principles of Master offer that's that's that's an interesting one um it the the main thing is to be able to deliver a message that is close to the truth but um not telling the complete truth um in many cases I'm backing that up with um physical evidence if you can so um some of the recent examples of it you know I quoted the second world war example were we had fake tanks and and fake aircraft and fake Communications because it was designed to Bluff the German uh intelligence gathering uh and the technical ability of the intelligence gathering at that time so they would think that this was going on if we look at other recent examples the um attack on surgery and Julius gripple in Salisbury in um 2017. part of the reason why Sergio scripal was attacked was yes he was on the chocolate in the UK that's right the novice novichok attack in the UK part of the reason why he was attacked with novichok was um not just because he was a uh in Russia in terms of Traitor uh uh an intelligence officer who had turned working with the west but because he lived in Salisbury um and how did why why was him living in Salisbury so important it's because as soon as the Russians got accused of it and you know they knew that we would identify Novi chalk at some stage and therefore it would Point directly to the Russians because they're the only ones that had it so as soon as um they were accused of doing that they could turn around and say oh no no it escaped from the British chemical defense establishment at Port and down just outside Salisbury and when the then prime minister Theresa May stood up in Parliament and accused the Russians of carrying out this heinous attack Vladimir Putin immediately stood up and said no no it must have escaped from portendon um outside Salisbury um and you know that was his first bit of masking throwing people off the scent but I had the effect that I wanted to because the then leader of the opposition Jeremy corbyn stood up in Parliament and asked the prime minister to prove that it hadn't escaped from Port and down and you know my vision then was Vladimir Putin was sitting behind his um huge oak desk in the Kremlin with a very large glass of best Russian vodka over ice in his best Crystal tumbler with a big white cat in his knee going my job is done for me because that doubt is enough to then create a political Hiatus to keep a debate going in something and therefore reduce the effect of any um uh decision making to try and punish Russia for what it did and everything else and you you it's the death of a Thousand Cuts so again with with maskarovka with everything else it's there's not one big thing that you do it's a lot of little interlinked messages um and activities that you carry out to to to have that wider effect and it has to be carefully planned it is a deliberately planned operation it's not something that you just do off the cuff how has the Russian use of muskarovka actually sometimes been detrimental to what the Russians are trying to achieve well that's that's very interesting indeed um you know as Vladimir Putin's been trying to put out you know since the uh and and the Russians were trying to put out since the uh break up the Soviet Union the end of the Cold War um and and Russia developing uh and losing a lot of the old Soviet States Russia's been trying to build this picture to the to the rest of the world of it being this second largest military very capable modern equipment and everything else um and that's where that message has been going out however in doing a lot of that you know the Russian Society is underpinned with a lot of criminal activity so those that were charged with designing the new tanks making sure that um the stocks in um storage were maintained to the right levels and all the rest of it were using their own maskerovka um as they pocketed the money into their their own bank accounts made themselves very wealthy indeed and then didn't do anything but they then go back and um tell Vladimir or his predecessors what they wanted to hear and and go yes of course Mr President everything is ready and we're getting there so is every element of Russian Society has has been using that information and and uh passing it up for for their effect and Vladimir Putin almost certainly will have known that's been going on but wounded wanted to ask the question and drill into it all he wanted to hear was yes this is all working and then he turns that round and uses that message to go out into the West so you know uh it's it's something that has the deceptions come back and as as it's got more and more complicated it's actually forced the Russians into position where I don't think Putin is in a position now where he really understands the reality of what's happening on the ground and the reality what's happening with it with his military because if he did he wouldn't have made the decision to go into Ukraine in the first place um you know he believed he was much stronger and much more capable than anything else his generals wanted to believe that but some of them do the reality but none of them were strong enough to go back and say um excuse me Mr President uh we we've got all of her assessments wrong it's not a good idea to go in because we'll be fine wanting um and it's not just confined to the Russians you know the same thing has happened to um us on different military operations and I'd argue that's why you know uh our activities in Afghanistan and our activities in Iraq turned out to be so disastrous so to what lengths does rush actually go to to make its deception credible and to commit to the narrative um you know it goes It goes to the the complete and ultimate lengths and what it's doing um in that um if you look at the the deception that was putting into the Russian people um the television programs that are put together the news bulletins that are put together are putting such a positive spin on you know everything that's going on in trying to justify their activities into Ukraine um they're they're bringing in um the messaging that they've been using for years that you this is all about NATO expansionism and the West was trying to get itself in a position to attack the motherland um attack Mother Russia and therefore we are defending Mother Russia and what we're doing and it's you know the the elements of truth that are in their NATO is expanding but you know it it doesn't do it deliberately to Transit defensive Alliance they miss those sorts of little bits and pieces out so that um there's the elements of the truth um but they know the effect that it's going to cause our politicians are very good at doing it as well yeah and having said that when you've got someone like evgeny pregosian the head of the Wagner group then basically debunking those ideas the reasons why Russia went on its special military operation that must be quite a sledgehammer to the the cause and the narrative it it is um and the pregosian coup if it was a coup attempt is is interesting there's an awful lot more to come and play out at that yo pregosian had been openly criticizing the Russian defense minister shoigu um and the Russian commander of all operations into Ukraine General grazimov um for months um and openly criticizing him on his YouTube channels on other social media outlets and everything else um part of this and part of what progression was doing again is in the information sphere you look at the whole front line and the front line in Ukraine is about 1200 kilometers long that's London to Barcelona in length um so it's it's a very very big front line backwards which is where the Wagner group were focused on um is about seven kilometers by seven kilometers um but everything that we were seeing out into the west and a lot of what was going on into Russian telegram channels um were you people pick up their information all the rest of it was from pregosian and it was all about backward back mode Wagner and everyone thought that you know the whole main effort was back Moot and Wagner and everything else and the rest of the Russian military weren't doing much because it wasn't being reported that was his information operation in in getting that level of support and and keeping keeping the focus in there the ukrainians were quite happy with that they reinforced that because that allowed them just to sort of slowly hold the Russians and backwards and get all the troops away to to do something else with them um but pagosian hey I'm I I I'm in two minds as to what the whole coup attempt was all about you know he hasn't with all this criticism he hasn't fallen out of a window um which is usually what happens or decided to have a heart attack um next weekend um he's been the only person of of uh from from Putin's Inner Circle let us managed to get away with being so openly critical and nothing's happened to him um and you know I think the coup attempt was he was going one step too far in his his information war against uh shoigu the defense minister and garasimov he got upset with Shogun garazamov um late last year whenever um the defense minister made the decision to replace um the who was the the general who was in command of operations that was General suvarican um uh or or his nickname was General Armageddon who had done a lot in Syria and pregosian and suvarican had worked very closely together in Syria and he got very upset whenever his friend um had been replaced by grazimov and then was forced to be his Deputy uh and he he saw that as an insult um and that's you know it's internal politics that's going on there that's probably underpinned by um dodgy criminal organized crime deals that are that are going on as well that are working things but now that pagosian seems to have been given this Lifeline of going and living in Belarus and you know I understand from some of the reporting I've read in the last couple of days his funding that he had has just been released back to him again um he's lost his contracts into the Russian military to provide catering support and all the rest of it but he you there's no talk about what's happening to his overseas activities in the Central African Republic and Mozambique and and elsewhere where he's making a fortune in controlling gold diamonds um hardwood exports and other bits and pieces but all of that is helping to keep your Vladimir Putin's Inner Circle together and then there's talk about pregosian setting up a military force he put a step not only yesterday um talking of uh opening up a new front um and getting involved back into the conflict again well if he's doing that and he's doing that from Belarus he'll only be doing that with a corporation of Vladimir Putin and he's Putin's Prodigy Putin made him um and if he's doing that with uh the cooperation of Vladimir Putin that Corporation is not going to be there that's something that they've negotiated after this coup attempt this this is all part of a massive charade potentially so there's a lot more to come out of it um and we haven't seen I haven't got any evidence of a lot of the players uh you know the the individuals that have named um are worthy are what they're doing or anything else I was expecting a night of the Long Knives where Vladimir Putin was going to go and start to remove some people quite quickly we've got no evidence of that at the moment um and therefore I think there's a lot more to play out in this particular one and it's one I'll be watching with interest for the next uh the next few weeks I think we all will um from your military experience um in terms of just section how do different cultures approach it or is there a unified kind of Concepts um I don't think there's a there's a unified concept whenever you're whenever you're deceiving you have to think of things from um your opposition's perspective so some of the best deception things that I've come across in military operations um former Yugoslavia in the Kosovo the serbs were brilliant at um providing deception and what they do is suggest that Bridges have been blown up by spray painting them in different ways by putting barrels with uh burning oil in them to get smoke masking on it and uh and put burned out vehicles on it and other things so that whenever you know the NATO Air Force flew over and took their pictures and looked at your on cursory glands that would look as if they've been damaged um they knew that our um our air forces were flying from very high and were looking for um Serbian air defense systems and they they realized that um the air defense Radars um had a similar frequency to um what you get out of a microwave oven so they'd take microwave ovens rip the doors off um tap the micro switch down and switch it on and you know the aircraft flying over they they're at Warning Systems would say oh that's that's a threat and they'd launch you know a hundred thousand dollar missile at a 25 microwave oven I think we destroyed more microwave ovens than than anything else and again the use of blew up tanks and other bits and pieces because they knew our aircraft were flying at 25 000 plus feet and you know a pilot with his um uh surveillance pod that he had on seized this thing that looks like a tank and drops his bombs on it um and we blew up lots and lots and lots of blew up tanks and and other things because you the serbs understood um their deception from our perspective So within that you've got the understanding of the culture of the people you're trying to deceive and you will reinforce um some of the beliefs that people have got on that whether you're deceiving from a political perspective or a military perspective or or anything else um and you will do that in in multiple different ways that um will will prick people's senses um and make them want to believe the picture that you're painting for them and that's what it's all about and we see that today we see that today in our politics you we look at um you know even politics in the UK it's it's politics by son bite and the sign bites are presenting a picture of what they believe that um their supporters um in the electorate want to hear rather than it necessarily being underpinned by substance um and it may not necessarily be you know 100 what can be delivered so it's it's unfortunately in today's Information Age it it is much more prevalent and has a greater effect on us because we go back to your second world war um and since then since then there are a lot fewer media Outlets people had to rely on things that were much more State control so it was easier to control deception and disinformation and propaganda from a state perspective for a wider effect that you have to have now everyone can get a message from um you know anywhere whenever they want with social media were permanently connected and people then will tune into um channels that they generally like and will listen to and you you whether that's on telegram or social media or elsewhere and one of the big problems there is is they're not necessarily then getting a balanced view of things people will tune into a channel they they like and they think oh that reinforces what I think you know I believe I like the people who are commenting on on all of this um and they don't realize that in many cases they're just getting fed something that's reinforcing their their own place you're not getting that um wider debate that there is out there so that you can sort of put things into perspective yourself but arguably as a society do we as individuals have the ability to bring in multiple sources and you know assess what's going on and make our minds up properly that's it's a really difficult task to do and the Russians know this the Chinese know this um they are deliberately working ways of trying to um to influence us you combine that with what they can scrape from social media and big data and combine that with other official intelligence analysis on it and it gets really scary indeed because you actually change the way people think it sounds to me that if you were to go back to your previous job as a military intelligence officer it would be completely different job with completely different challenges the ones you experienced um no not at all um intelligence you know arguably some people call it the second oldest profession um a lot of the tactics techniques and and procedures from the Year Dot are still used today um you know it's it's all about Gathering little bits of information and trying to build a picture from that and with that picture that you're building then make an assessment as to what you think that means and therefore what could potentially happen in the future and I liken it to having you know a hundred thousand hundred thousand piece jigsaw puzzles you mix them all up together and you don't have um the box cover of what the final picture would be or the final pictures that are in there and and you're you're Gathering little bits of information to try and work out where all these pieces pieces get together so when you know in television terms you're Gathering one element of a color of a pixel at a time and trying to work out what the overall picture moving picture is going to be on on the on the television and then use that to predict what's going to happen in the future um that's why it's really easy when something has happened to look back and go intelligence miss this we got that when you've got 2020 hindsight you know what the answer is you've got the picture because Something's Happened but whenever you're trying to develop that and predict what's going on in the future You're Expecting intelligence teams of 2024 site if everyone who was Intelligence had 2024 sight nobody would be working in it we'd be winning the lottery every weekend so um you know it's it's a difficult game and a lot of the skills are exactly the same as they've always been even going back to Sun Tzu's time um however with modern technology and um everything else there are additional set of skills that have to come in an additional um things that you have to use and you when you're gathering information um it's you they uh our interconnected world is is something that provides real challenges and real opportunities and then when you get into um and here's where doctrinally a lot of ex-military people are going to come start shouting at me offensive intelligence operations where you're carrying out intelligence operations where um you are helping promote that deception because you've worked out where the effect is and your assessments that you may release out into the um the public domain maybe um some some that you have spun in a way to get a particular message across um that that's that's something that you have to take into account more and more often do you have a concept if you take a step back of how successful or effective offensive intelligence operations have been in Ukraine um I think I think I think that being quite successful in many areas um I think the ukrainians are in a fantastic position as I said because they they've got the Western training and they've got the the old Soviet psyche um in what they're doing and understand what the Russians are doing and that's why they're progressing everything very solely very deliberately um I'm taking great care in what they're doing um and everything else so they can see the risk and work it I think um we're being manipulated more from a uh a political perspective um in you the way the Russians are using Scare Tactics against us so we talked about this operation nuclear power plant a lot of the reason why that is coming out and coming forward and the Russians are carrying out activities in there and everything else is they know that certain countries um around the world and particular countries in the EU are terrified about nuclear accidents um because they know that the the Coalition governments um within those countries um have have got um are uh in a position where the the potential environmental threat and the Potential Threat to their countries and all the rest is something that they will play on from a political perspective they know that that will therefore increase the pressure to stop uh try and stop the war to negotiate to not give the ukrainians the the weapon systems that they want and everything else and of course it suits the ukrainians um whenever they're they're talking about the threats growing because they can then use that to try and Target uh the West to say keep giving us more weapons keep giving us the weapons faster keep doing that if we look at president zielinski um and it wasn't really disinformation it's more manipulating the information sphere if you look at whenever he went round and toward the capitals and unturred um you know the United States and then came into Parliament and then went to Germany his speech in Parliament where he talked about um uh you're having an afternoon tea with the speaker and things like that and he um uh invoked the memories of Winston Churchill the the way he wrote those words were designed to try and manipulator thinking and you know he he understood what you the the British psyche um he understood how to um get everyone thinking this is brilliant it feels really good supporting Ukraine he achieved that through the use of information so you know it has been critical in the whole conflict so far and one of the highest value targets for Russia is a man called General boudinov the head of Ukraine's military intelligence there are thought to have been several attempts on his life can you tell us a bit more about him and about how he's shaping the war effort yeah but badanoff is he's he's a quiet man um sitting in the background running a fantastic um intelligence operation not just using his own intelligent assets but but also been able to integrate a lot of things that he will never had exposure to beforehand um you know the intelligence feeds that he's getting from the West um and you know he'll he'll be given a lot of help in doing that and bringing it in but he's and he's he's old school as well um you know he's a a command of a background I know that from people that have talked to him he would far rather be in the front line I'm fighting um uh rather than being the head of military intelligence uh but he sort of fell into that by accident but he's also very good at it and this is why we're seeing um not just him being very careful and developing his his intelligence picture and allowing the operation through the ground to be properly intelligence LED but we're also seeing an awful lot of other activities that are happening um so it wouldn't surprise me there's no evidence in this this is my personal assessment but wouldn't surprise me if he was behind the um the Russian um Nationals who are fighting for Ukraine who carried out the small incursion into Belgrade um across the Russian border it wouldn't surprise me if he's behind the Drone attacks that we've seen um going up towards Moscow and and elsewhere the one thing that he will be behind um and I think it's absolutely fantastic are what I'm calling the Ukrainian Special Operations executive operations they've got a lot of things going on in russian-occupied territory um and across inside Russia itself were you know factories mysteriously Catch Fire um were um individuals in the the donbass region who are supporting the Russians um and are in political positions or ahead of the police in those particular areas and supporting Russian activities um have uh get killed in um improvised explosive attacks um we we see the derailment of Russian um Railway carry is carrying supplies combat suppliers down into down into Ukraine and we see um different things just just blowing up attacks on airports um attacks elsewhere all of this I suspect badanoff is behind and again he's giving us a master class on how to integrate um not just what he's getting from a tactical perspective but bringing um that strategic intelligence feed that he's getting from the West as well and then support everything that's happening on a tactical perspective with his operational level Special Operations second world war type soe operations going on behind um I almost said German lines behind Russian line you mentioned that strategic um information fee that he's getting from Western allies intelligence feed ultimately how much difference do you think that will make that support will make in the way that this war ends um that is probably making a bigger difference than the supply of Western tanks Western aircraft and anything else and is is the one thing that people haven't realized yet you're part of the reason why the Russian attack on Cave at the very beginning failed was because Western intelligence had watched the Russian build up across the border um there came a point in the Russian build up where it was quite clear that this wasn't just another training exercise and you threatening activity from Vladimir Putin he had made the decision that he was going to cross over um and um Western intelligence was sitting watching where his Vehicles were giving the likely routes that were going to come in looking at where the helicopters were being deployed to monitoring what was happening and could make an assessment to say probably within 24 hours the exact time that they were going to cross the border and do everything else that would have been fed into Ukraine because Ukraine's um in response to the initial attacks were very well prepared and they blunted the Russians in a way the Russians didn't expect and again this is this is happening you know across the board the capabilities that the West has in in watching what's going on are absolutely phenomenal um and that that is what is helping you create um at every turn it's not the magic um bullet it's not the yeah and Western Equipment isn't the Magic Bullet you know it still gets down to you know a very guttural human on human activity at the front line and it's absolutely horrific but it is giving the Ukraine uh the ukrainians um an advantage over the Russians Philip Ingram it's been great having you on front line thank you so much for your time thank you you've been watching Frontline for times radio my thanks to Louis Sykes our producer to support the work of Frontline hit the Subscribe button you can also listen to times radio throughout the day or read it at times dot Co dot UK thanks for watching bye-bye

Channel: Times Radio

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Id: Kn3UZwnUC5k

Length: 41min 59sec (2519 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 05 2023