Romania shot down a second drone in its own airspace within 24 hours on Saturday morning, a milestone that would have been unthinkable for a NATO member just weeks ago and now marks the second time in two days that Romanian pilots have opened fire inside their own country’s skies. President Nicușor Dan announced the […]

North Korea has resumed sending Russia one of its deadliest ballistic missiles, a weapon that started this war as a punchline for its terrible aim and has since become one of the most accurate short-range missiles in Moscow’s arsenal. That’s according to Polkovnik GSH, an open-source intelligence account with close ties to Ukraine’s armed forces, […]

The first publicly documented combat test of Russia’s upgraded anti-drone tank defense system ended in failure, with footage showing a Russian T-72B3A tank taking a direct hit from a Ukrainian FPV drone despite carrying the modified Arena-M active protection system specifically built to stop exactly that threat, Militarnyi reported. The video shows the FPV drone […]

Photos of scorched, twisted wreckage now circulating from Russian sources may be the first physical proof that a Dutch-built cruise missile has actually been used in combat. Images shared by the open-source tracking account on Telegram show what is presumed to be the tail section of a Ruta Block 1 cruise missile, built by the […]

Ukraine’s Flamingo cruise missile has struck deep inside Russia again, this time hitting a defense plant that builds the ejection seats meant to save the lives of Russian fighter pilots and the anti-aircraft missiles meant to shoot down Ukrainian drones. Ukrainian forces attacked the Avitek plant in the Russian city of Kirov early Friday morning […]

A Russian shipyard supplier best known for arming warships just patented a way to put its naval gun on wheels, and the design tells a story about a much larger program that appears to have stalled. Saint Petersburg-based Arsenal Machine-Building Plant, the manufacturer behind Russia’s AK-100, AK-130, AK-726 and A-192M naval guns, has patented a […]

A military aircraft has crashed in Russia’s Moscow region near the town of Zvenigorod, with the pilot reportedly ejecting before impact, according to Russian local media and Telegram channels reporting from the scene. Footage circulating from the crash site shows wreckage and emergency response activity near Zvenigorod, roughly 40 miles (65 km) west of central […]

A Ukrainian F-16 pilot did something no American-made fighter jet had confirmed doing before in this war: shoot down a Russian warplane in air-to-air combat. General Dan Caine, the four-star Air Force officer who serves as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and holds the highest military rank in the United States, told the […]

Russia will likely come out of its war against Ukraine as a more dangerous military power than it was before the invasion began, despite losing equipment and troops at a scale no major military has suffered in a conventional war since World War II, according to an analysis by Jakub Janovsky published on Fronts.co. That […]

Russian engineers have turned one of their most common military helicopters into a flying jammer built specifically to blind Ukraine’s long-range strike drones, Militarnyi reported, after a Russian propaganda Telegram channel accidentally revealed the previously unknown system in its own footage. The outlet identified the aircraft as a Mi-8, a twin-engine transport helicopter the Soviet […]

A satellite photograph taken Sunday appears to confirm what Ukraine’s president claimed just two days earlier: a Russian strategic bomber sitting at Engels air base did not survive a recent drone strike. The open-source monitoring community AviVector published commercial satellite imagery from Planet Labs PBC, dated July 19, showing what the group identified as a […]

Somewhere in a Russian drone factory, an engineer looked at a satellite-jamming crisis that has cost the Kremlin countless drones and countless rubles, and solved it with the same tool Boy Scouts use to find their way out of the woods. A Ukrainian radio technology specialist says Russia has started bolting a basic magnetic compass […]

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Friday that Ukraine’s Security Service, known as the SBU, destroyed a Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bomber at the military airfield in Engels, Russia, part of what he described as a new round of successful long-range strikes deep inside Russian territory. Zelenskyy made the announcement in a socail media, saying Ukrainian forces also […]

Tell the Russian people about the carnage in Russia’s war with Ukraine. Tell them about the Russian lives lost and the crushing financial cost of a five-year invasion of a sovereign nation. Former President Ronald Reagan ensured that he got information into the former Soviet Union to truthfully speak to the people about their government’s lies about the cost – in lives and money – of their war in Afghanistan. After ten years, in 1989, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the final chapter in the Cold War.

Russia’s Vladimi Putin seemingly doesn’t care about the Russian lives lost or the crushing financial cost of a five-year invasion of Ukraine. Over 1.4 million Russian casualties (killed, wounded, missing, or captured), and over 500,000 killed at a cost of over $500 billion. Are the people in Russia aware of the magnitude of this tragedy? Are they aware of Mr. Putin’s view that Ukraine has no right to exist and he is justified in invading a sovereign Ukraine that gave up its nuclear weapons for security assurances?

Indeed, Ukraine’s casualties are over 600,000, with close to 140,000 killed, including 16,000 civilians. The cost so far is close to $600 billion, with a price tag of $U.S. 1 trillion to reconstruct a devastated Ukraine. This is the price Ukraine is paying because of the Russian invasion and Mr. Putin’s goal of attempting to recreate the Russian empire.

President Donald Trump has reached out to Mr. Putin numerous times to secure a cease fire and an eventual peace treaty. To date, those efforts have been unsuccessful, but Mr. Trump persists, fortunately. But until we secure a cease fire, Ukraine needs the support of the U.S. and the European Union, for the weapons and missile defense systems needed for its survival.

Fortunately, the recent NATO Summit of 32 allied countries reaffirmed their strong support to Ukraine, pledging 70 billion Euros to Ukraine and giving Ukraine a green light to produce PATRIOT missile interceptors.

But the U.S. – and our NATO allies -- can do more to get the truth to the Russian people. The truth about the hundreds of thousands of Russians killed in Ukraine and the bereaved families that are paying the ultimate price.

Although the United States Information Agency closed in October 1999, it transferred its important mission to the Department of State. And hopefully our colleagues at State are working hard to ensure that we are getting the message to the Russian people that the war must end; that they and the people in Ukraine have suffered enough. That Mr. Putin and his cronies need to explain why so many men and women died, in a war Mr. Putin created, as he enriches himself. A war that has made the Russian Federation a pariah state.

This should be a whole government mission: to disseminate primarily in Russia the truth about the hundreds of thousands of Russians (and Ukrainians) killed and maimed in a war created by an arrogant and inept Putin.

Although the audience for this important message is the Russian people, China should also be mindful of the tragedy of the war in Ukraine. Indeed, China is aligned with a Russian pariah state, heavily sanctioned by the international community. Is this the image China wants to share with the world?

The NATO Summit was clear in its support of Ukraine, the victim of a cruel and brutal Russian invasion. It’s time for the Russian government to listen to the Russian people and end this bloody war.

The author is the former associate director of national intelligence. All statement of fact, opinion or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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Ukrainian drones reportedly struck Russia’s Engels air base, officially known as Engels-2, in the Saratov region overnight into July 16, according to Russian Telegram channels and independent monitoring groups, with residents of both Engels and the neighboring city of Saratov reporting a barrage of low-flying drones followed by a string of powerful explosions. Engels-2 sits […]

Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, the branch of the Ukrainian military built specifically around drone warfare, said operators from the Rarog unit struck a Russian Mi-28 attack helicopter with a FPV (first-person-view) drone, a small remote-controlled aircraft flown by an operator wearing video goggles that show a live feed from a camera mounted on the drone […]

A satellite passing over southern Russia captured the aftermath Tuesday evening, and the image leaves little room for doubt: the Russian border guard ship Izumrud sits partially submerged against its pier, the surrounding dock scorched black from fire, exactly as Ukraine’s navy said it would be after announcing the ship’s destruction earlier the same day. […]

Ukraine’s navy sank a Russian border guard ship near Novorossiysk using an unmanned strike boat. The Ukrainian Navy said its sailors sank the Rubin-class patrol ship Izumrud (354), a Russian Federal Security Service border guard vessel, using the Sargan-3000, a domestically built unmanned surface strike platform that has entered service with Ukraine’s naval forces over […]

Ukraine’s military appears to have carried out its first mass simultaneous strike using converted light aircraft that function as reusable, remotely piloted bombers, with Serhii Sternenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s Defense Minister, publishing photos showing at least ten of the modified planes armed with Soviet-designed high-explosive bombs and describing the image as one worth calling […]

Ukrainian forces have carried out what the military describes as the world’s first known combat mission combining a naval drone with an armed ground robot, using an unmanned surface vessel to ferry a machine-gun-equipped robotic vehicle across the Black Sea and land it directly on Russian-occupied shoreline, United24 Media reported July 13, citing Ukraine’s 123rd […]