David Petraeus

The United Kingdom’s armed forces have long made an indispensable contribution to the defense of the free world. They are widely respected for their professionalism, discipline, and fighting spirit, and they remain central to the multinational coalitions that Western democracies must form and sustain in an increasingly contested security environment. I was privileged to serve with “Brits” on innumerable occasions throughout my 37 years in uniform, including in Cold War Europe, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan – and, in the latter two, to have them under my command. They were consistently magnificent.

The below is an edited transcript of David Petraeus’s interview with CNN’s Jim Sciutto. On the war’s momentum: It has fundamentally shifted, and I'm normally fairly guarded and cautious about this, but the tide clearly has turned because the success of this offensive, as important as it is itself on the ground, is that it reflects a hugely important development: Ukraine has been incomparably better than Russia in recruiting, training, equipping, organising and employing additional forces. Russia has been struggling to do just that, literally running out of soldiers, ammunition tanks, fighting vehicles and so forth. Ukraine is supported superbly by the US and Nato, whereas Russia, even if it declared mobilisation today, could not reverse this fundamental reality.