Russian troops surviving an average of '20 and 30 minutes' on Ukraine's front line due to AI 'killing machines', CIA says
Russian troops entering the front line in Ukraine are surviving between 20 and 30 minutes on average due to deadly AI "killing machine" drones.
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Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe revealed the numbers and said that Vladimir Putin is also losing up to 7,000 soldiers every week in the conflict.
Mr Ratcliffe was speaking at the Pennsylvania Defence and Innovation Summit, where he attributed the deadly conditions to Ukraine's low-cost lethal combat drones.
He said: "What I would say is our intelligence is consistent with some of the open-source reporting you may have seen in Ukraine.
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"So the average life expectancy of a Russian recruit right now, arriving on the battlefield in Ukraine, is estimated to be between 20 and 30 minutes."
"And that's because AI-powered drones have gotten to be such specialised, low-cost killing machines.
"It's why we're now four and a half years into that conflict."
An estimated two million troops have been killed, wounded or are missing since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.
Some 1.4 million of them are believed to be Russian, according to a recent estimate by the Centre for Strategic & International Studies.
Ukraine's leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy has previously said that AI drones account for more than 80 per cent of destroyed Russian targets.
Putin recently threatened to respond to Ukrainian attacks on its soil with retaliatory strikes that would be "several times more powerful", adding that the scale of such responses would increase.
The president was declining calls to establish a peace deal following Ukraine’s latest drone attacks on Russian oil refineries and ports, Reuters reported.
The Moscow refinery was hit on May 19, and the Ryazan refinery on the 15th, which accounts for almost five per cent of Russia's refining volumes.
According to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence, in 2022 Kyiv had the ability to hit targets some 630km away.
As of this year, it claims its long-range weapons are destroying targets "at about a distance of 1,750km".