By Sebastian Shukla, Tim Lister, CNN
Tallinn, Estonia (CNN) — Russian President Vladimir Putin is running out of time to win his war against Ukraine, amid a stalemate on the battlefield and growing troubles at home, a European intelligence chief has told CNN.
In the next four or five months, Putin “may not be able to negotiate from a position of strength anymore,” Kaupo Rosin, head of Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, said in an interview at the intelligence agency’s headquarters in Tallinn.
Rosin detailed a combination of economic, military and societal pressures facing Putin that could force him to the negotiating table. “Time is not in Russia’s favor,” he said.
A former Soviet republic, Estonia is now a listening post for NATO, and Rosin spends much of his working life analyzing events inside the country’s overbearing and hostile neighbor.
“I do not hear any more talk about total victory. People (in the Kremlin) recognize that the situation on the Ukrainian battlefield is not going too well,” Rosin said, adding that Moscow was losing more men than it can recruit.
In the two years to January, Russian forces advanced at an average of 70 meters (230 feet) a day, with about 1,000 soldiers being killed or wounded daily, according to analysts from Washington DC-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and others.
Even those miniscule advances have come to a stuttering halt this year.
The Russians are “losing 15-20,000 soldiers a month dead. Not injured, dead,” said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio last week.
In April, 35,203 Russian soldiers were killed or severely wounded, according to the Ukrainian defense ministry, similar to each of the previous two months.
CNN is unable to independently verify the losses from both sides. Moscow and Kyiv refrain from publishing official figures.
Most of the casualties are being inflicted by drones, in which both Ukraine and Russia have invested heavily. Rosin predicts that shift toward drone warfare will limit changes on the front lines.
Currently, both sides are “unable to conduct a massive, mechanized breakthrough” into areas deep in the enemy rear, he said.
The balance between the two sides in drone technology has shifted back and forth as the war has progressed. But Ukraine claims that a new generation of interceptors is blunting the impact of Russian attacks on its cities.
“The share of Shahed drones shot down by interceptor drones has doubled over the past four months,” Ukraine’s defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov said this week.
Another mobilization?
If Russia wanted to revitalize its campaign and capture the rest of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region – its publicly stated goal – the only option would be “some type of forced mobilization,” according to Rosin.
“If the Russians were able to mobilize another couple of hundred thousand more people to the battlefield, that would be a problem (for Ukraine),” Rosin said. But such a move “would create additional internal stability risks” for the Kremlin, he added.
“They (the Kremlin) are very concerned about internal stability, monitoring it very carefully… This is not the decision they would make very easily.”
Moscow ordered a partial mobilization of reservists in September 2022, seven months after its full-scale invasion began. The mobilization triggered an internal backlash, including protests and a large exodus of men seeking to avoid the draft.
Recruitment has since relied on regional governments offering huge bonuses and other benefits to those signing up, but their ability to offer these incentives has shrunk as Russia’s economy comes under pressure.
The cost of the war, international sanctions