Exclusive: Drone warfare makes us long for the trenches, say frontline soldiers

Ukraine: The Latest

The episode examines the evolving nature of the war in Ukraine, focusing on the humanitarian crisis involving 2/75,000 missing persons repor

Key takeaways

• The Red Cross reports 275,000 people are registered as missing in connection with the war.
• President Trump and President Zelensky met at the UN to discuss an energy ceasefire and potential peace deals.
• New drone technologies like 'mother drones' and 'ambush drones' are making traditional infantry combat increasingly difficult.
• The EU has removed Russian billionaires Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman from its sanctions list.
• Russian forces have attempted to infiltrate Ukraine through the Brotherhood natural gas pipeline.

Main topics

• Drone warfare evolution
• UN General Assembly diplomacy
• Humanitarian crisis and missing persons

Notable quotes

Russia does not want peace.

Conclusion

The episode provides a sobering look at the technological escalation o

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) The Telegraph. Speaker 4 (0:09) Support comes from WISE, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. Your life is global. Your money should be too. Some providers promise no fees on overseas transfers. Don't be fooled. Extra costs often hide in bloated exchange rates. Choose WISE. You can send, spend and receive money in over 40 currencies. Count on the exchange rates that you'd usually see on Google. That's how millions save billions on hidden fees. Be smart. Get WISE. Visit WISE.com. Speaker 2 (1:01) Don't delay. Vote from abroad.org. Speaker 6 (1:09) I'm Francis Durnley and this is Ukraine, the latest. Today, as the Red Cross says 275,000 people have been registered as missing in connection with the war, we return to the United Nations in New York as Presidents Trump and Zelensky meet and offer their views on the best way to bring the war to an end. Then we hear the perspectives of some soldiers on the front lines and how some, after being ceaselessly hunted by drones for years, long for the days of trench warfare. Speaker 8 (1:40) Bravery takes you through the most unimaginable hardships to finally reward you with victory. Speaker 1 (1:49) Russia does not want peace. First, we defend with our help for Ukraine also our freedom and our European values. Speaker 7 (2:00) If I'm president, I will have that war settled in one day, 24 hours. Russia cannot win this war. Speaker 1 (2:07) We cannot as Europeans. Speaker 6 (2:11) Nobody's going to break Speaker 1 (2:12) us. Speaker 6 (2:13) We're strong. We're Ukrainians. It's Wednesday, the 23rd of September, four years and 211 days since the full-scale invasion began. And today I'm joined by my co-host Dom Nichols and later just returned from a trip to Ukraine, Colin Freeman. But first, as ever, the latest from the military realm. Dom, where do you want to start today? Speaker 5 (2:32) Well, thanks, Francis. Hello, everyone. Let's go straight to Kiev. It's been under attack this morning. Two people killed, a further 25. Russian drones came down in the Donitsky, Holosivsky and Solomiansky districts of Kyiv. That's basically an arc from the southeast, south and southwest. Now, the latter, the Solomiansky district, that also hosts the Kyiv Central Station. There were strikes nearby, but Yukra Zelenitsia, the state-owned railway operator, said that there'd been no damage to the station, but a nine-storey residential building nearby was hit. Also hit nearby was the circular market, Shaiba Market. The fire broke out. And then there was some dramatic footage I saw actually from a number of different angles. Obviously different phones people were using. Some footage of a drone that hit just metres away from one of the universities in Kiev. Students only recently returned there. They'd been having classes online for weeks because of the situation. But you see people running for cover there. Elsewhere, no real move on the ground. Caveat. We don't actually know for sure. And I'll say why in just a moment. It is extremely violent. Ukraine's general staff said that 1,560 Russians were casualties yesterday. The reason I say we don't exactly know is because there's been a big OPSEC, Operational Security, clampdown by 3rd Army Corps around Operation Vivaldi, as we've been talking about. Great name. There are reports that... the Third Army Corps are still advancing, still pushing, well, heading east in the vicinity of Liman in the Donbass, but we're not really seeing an awful lot. So they might still be having this clamp down and not a number of open source intelligence analysts are saying that they are still moving. There are reports the Third Army Corps had appealed to open source intelligence analysts to not to publish any geolocated data on Ukrainian advances in the vicinity of Liman as Operation Vivaldi was getting going because it's thought... highly likely that Russian analysts are taking those data themselves and then that is being fed into the Russian machine and that might be one of the reasons why Vivaldi seems to have had the success that it's had so all very murky but we think Third Army Corps is still moving. Now then, elsewhere, Russian forces we are told made two attempts this month alone to infiltrate ukraine's northern sumy region through the gas pipeline that comes down through russia's kursk region this is the brotherhood pipeline 4 500 kilometers of it 2 800 miles natural gas pipeline 56 inch diameter pipe that these guys have been crawling through we've seen this before particularly around kubiansk in the northeast of the country russia trying to infiltrate through these pipes i mean it's got to be bloody grim stuff and there's a drone waiting for you at the end. So it's never really been that successful, but they are trying it again, we are told, through the Brotherhood pipeline. It runs from Siberia down through western Ukraine and into central and western Europe. Ukrainian forces say they intercepted a 10-man group. 10 Russian soldiers on September the 12th, and then just in the last few days, an even larger group in the vicinity of Malakoshe-Kivka, that's about 20km north of Sumy. They say 29 Russian soldiers were killed there and three wounded. As I say, if you're crawling along a pipe, then it's mainly killed. You're not generally wounded. It's pretty binary. Across the country yesterday, 10 people killed, 53 others injured. Odessa got a very large pounding last night, the port and the civilian infrastructure. This comes from the governor there, Ole Kipa. There's a commercial cargo ship flying the flag of Antigua and Barbuda was hit along the Odessan port. The ship's captain, a Ukrainian citizen, was killed. The rest of the crew was evacuated. Speaker 6 (6:05) Continuing the theme that we've been reporting now for. For many weeks of real increased activity. Speaker 5 (6:09) Yeah, and obviously it's very difficult to stop these things coming in because it's on the coast. It gets so little notice, especially if the missiles and the drones, the banderoles and what have you, are kind of sea level or very low. 119 of 161 drones brought down. across the country yesterday by the ukraine's air force said including possibly one i've seen some footage from the cockpit of a mig-29 fulcrum shooting down a russian drone with an air-to-air missile undated so we're not sure if that's from the last 24 hours but i've not seen that before okay looking a little bit wider ukraine's Foreign Affairs Ministry put out a social media post of one of their tennis players. So this is a Ukrainian tennis player, Oleksandra Olynykova. Right after winning the opening match at the WTA 500 tournament in Singapore, she used her post-match interview to draw attention to the humanitarian catastrophe in Oleshky. This is an occupied Kherson oblast. It's a Ukrainian city that's completely cut off. It's on the left bank of the Dnipro River, opposite Kherson. We think 2,000 people are still in the city, down from a... a total of about 24,000 before the start of the full-scale invasion. And it's been totally blockaded for months. No food deliveries for weeks now. It's extremely difficult to get medicine or any kind of aid at all. And Alexandra said, please Google about Oleschke, she told the audience on the mic. So like I say, we don't think the city's got electricity or gas, severe shortages of food, medicine, other essentials. We are going to keep an eye on that and do more on that story soon. Absolutely. So thanks to everybody who's written in on it. We're on the case. Now into Russia, Russian Defence Ministry said 514 Ukrainian drones were shot down last night over 18 regions, including Bashkortostan, occupied Crimea and the Black and Azov seas. Now, they say things were shot down. However, local residents reported hearing explosions in Ufa. That's the capital of Bashkortostan. The Russian MOD had nothing to say about this. Explosions and smoke reported near the oil refinery there. And then just a little bit wider away from the sort of battlefield itself, the SBU, Ukrainian Security Service, said they've prevented a high-profile terrorist attack in Rivne. That's in the northwest of the country. They say a Russian agent was detained who was preparing an explosive device. He said he was going to attack one of the state institutions in the city center of Rivne. The SBU said they caught the individual red-handed with a homemade bomb in a rubbish can. going to place near the administrative building, planning to detonate it remotely during rush-out to try and get to maximum casualties. We are told this individual is being held without bail and faces up to 12 years in prison. And then just finally for me, the Kiev Post are reporting that 275,000 people have been registered as missing in connection with the war. This comes from the international community, the Red Cross. president. So the ICRC, International Community of the Red Cross, they say they receive about 10,000 new tracing requests every month and that includes military personnel, prisoners of war, civilians. It doesn't distinguish between Ukrainian and Russian cases. All tracing information is confidential, they say. So the ICRC receives information about prisoners of war that each country has through official lists exchanged by Russia and Ukraine. As we've been reporting, it is one of those areas where the two countries... have managed to find some form of accommodation for prisoners of war, the occasional swap, and also repatriation of the dead. Now, ICRC representatives, they have... full and free access to visit detention facilities whenever they like and connect oral or written messages from prisoners for their family back home. This goes hand in hand with Ukraine's I Want to Find project that said in August that they'd received over 210,000 requests concerning missing Russian military personnel since the start. Speaker 6 (9:56) And that's the Speaker 5 (9:56) one that you Speaker 6 (9:56) used to try and identify... Speaker 5 (9:58) Yes, the I Want to Find project. It's set up by Ukraine specifically for Russian families to find missing Russian service personnel. It's seen as a... as a goodwill humanitarian gesture if if you like and yes i used the i want to find project when i was looking for nathan stobart the british man who who moved to russia in 2020 and was told he had to join the army for a year or he'd be deported thereby leaving his wife and child behind so he He did, and he went missing last December, missing, presumed dead, somewhere, we think, in the Donbass region. But yeah, I reached out to the I Want to Find project. They were helpful. They accepted our request, but they came back a few weeks later, so they couldn't find him. No, it is a very interesting project. Just Google it, I Want to Find, and have a look around. And I think Speaker 6 (10:44) that was last Tuesday's episode, and we'll link to that in the show notes. Yeah, Tuesday the 15th, Tuesday Speaker 5 (10:47) last week. That's an absolutely Speaker 6 (10:49) extraordinary story. Yeah. It was. And just so I'm clear on this, Don, before we go to the diplomatic updates. So these missing people, so this is not including people who are POWs, not confirmed dead of either side. So these are people of which basically we