The Telugu...

...podcasts.

I'm David Knowles, and this is Ukraine, the latest.

Nobody is going to break us. We're strong. We're Ukrainians.

General David Petres is one of America's most famous soldiers in the modern era, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, before a year in charge of the CIA.

The telegraphs Ukraine, the latest podcast team, interviewed Petres about his views on the war in Ukraine.

He spoke about the Ukrainian counteroffensive, arms deliveries, western support, and what the invasion means for the future of warfare,

and how western foreign policy has changed in the shadow of Iraq.

Myself, Francis Stanley and Dom Nichols, spoke to David Petres a few weeks ago.

I started by asking him to summarize his perspective on the big picture in military and political terms.

Did he think Ukraine is winning? Or losing?

Well, I'm very cautious about using terms like winning and losing.

You may recall during the surge in Iraq and all the rest of that, it just refused to say that at all.

I would just say we're making progress or we're not.

Although, frankly, we were losing prior to the surge in Iraq. In fact, we were losing in Afghanistan when we returned our focus to it as well.

I think the reality is, and if you examine it, you'll see that really from the first few weeks of the war, the Ukrainians have been winning back, liberating parts of their territory repeatedly,

almost without any Russian achievements with the one exception of the very costly seizure of Bakmuth during their otherwise undistinguished winter campaign by the Russians.

But, of course, the Ukrainians won the battles of Kiev, Kharkiv and Chernihiv and Sumi in the north and northeast in the east.

The Kiev particularly significant since that was presumably the Russian main effort.

After all, their main focus was to take the capital, topple the Zelinsky government and replace him with someone who was pro-Russian.

That obviously failed and quite dramatically so.

Then, of course, subsequent to that, the Ukrainians launched a counteroffensive in the Kharkiv province area, took back the bulk of that last fall.

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