The average life expectancy of a Russian soldier going into battle in Ukraine is 20 to 30 minutes, Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe said Wednesday.

Ratcliffe spoke at the Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit, where he blamed the deadly conditions on Ukraine’s combat drones equipped with artificial intelligence.

“What I would say is that our intelligence is consistent with some of the open source reporting that may have been seen in Ukraine,” Ratcliffe said. “So the average life expectancy of a Russian conscript now arriving on the battlefield in Ukraine is estimated to be between 20 and 30 minutes.”

“And that’s because AI-powered drones have become very specialized, low-cost killing machines. And that’s why we’re now four and a half years into that conflict,” Ratcliffe added.

The Russian Defense Ministry’s press team did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside normal business hours by Business Insider.

The CIA director’s comment is the first time a senior U.S. official has affirmed the trend in life expectancy first reported recently among Russian military bloggers.

Several of these pro-war experts, often well connected to the Kremlin or its ground forces, said in May that Russian recruits tended to live between 10 days and three weeks after arriving at their training camps.

One blogger, under the nickname “The House Among the Laurels,” wrote that the final stage of a recruit’s deadly military career is a frontal assault (Russia’s primary way of trying to take Ukrainian territory) that lasts 20 to 35 minutes before he dies.

Ukraine said this month that Russia has lost about 1.4 million troops since the start of its large-scale invasion, with more than 1,000 Kremlin soldiers killed or wounded almost every day. In May, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said it was killing about 200 Russian soldiers for every kilometer of territory claimed by Moscow.

Some Western analyses, such as a report published this month by researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, have corroborated kyiv’s figures. CSIS analysts Seth G. Jones and Riley McCabe wrote that Russia’s battlefield loss rate, about 30,000 per month, is dwarfing its recruitment rate of 27,000 per month.

“The casualty ratio between Russia and Ukraine has likely increased to nearly 8:1 in the first half of 2026, up from between 2:1 and 3:1 for much of the war,” their analysis said. The pair said they studied 20,000 incidents involving Ukrainian attacks on Russian targets to obtain their data.

Ratcliffe said Wednesday that Russia had gained only about 1% of Ukraine’s total territory in the 18 months since he was named CIA director.

“The pace of their advancement has slowed as Ukraine masters emerging technologies,” Ratcliffe said.

The United States needs to learn from Ukraine’s drone war, he added.

“And in this case, drone warfare, asymmetric warfare, is a great equalizer and shows why we have to lead this in every aspect to maintain our place in the global market,” he said.