(DNIPRO, UKRAINE) –Â Ukraine has clawed back strategic parity on the battlefield by targeting Russia’s economic Achilles heel, its oil refineries, a campaign that could ultimately precipitate an economic crisis allowing Ukrainian forces to reclaim occupied territories without firing a shot, according to former British Army soldier and journalist Shaun Pinner.
Speaking on Times Radio’s “Frontline” programme with Kate Gerbeau, Pinner, a veteran of the defence of Mariupol in 2022 who was subsequently captured and tortured by Russian forces before his release in a prisoner exchange, said the trajectory of the war had shifted decisively.
“What they have done is claw back the battlefield,” Pinner said. “Ukraine has unlocked that by hitting all the refineries and innovating, building its own ballistics and causing an essentially, I was saying 12 months ago, we could cause an economic crisis in Russia and walk back into the occupied territories without a shot being fired, and people were laughing at me. Now look what we are talking about. We are talking about an economic disaster.”
Pinner, who now works as a journalist writing about Ukraine for London Loves Business, had just returned to his home in Dnipro following a visit to Canada. He described a grim welcome. “Literally getting off the train station and then I text my wife and said, ‘I think there is a drone or something above the train station.’ And then she texts back and went, ‘Yeah, there is an alert.’ And just as I was texting her, the sirens went and then about three hours later, I saw the surface to air man pads that were being launched from the train station.”
He noted a recent escalation after a deceptive lull. “We went through about a two week quiet period, but now that has changed. Now we are getting ballistics and drones again. We are on somebody’s radar somewhere, unfortunately.”
While in Canada, Pinner witnessed a major coordinated attack on his home city from afar. “It is worse being away actually because at least when you are in country you can make an informed decision and you can say get down to the shelter and you have some sort of control even though you do not essentially have it. Being away, there are long periods of silence and you are just waiting for that text message to say I am okay.”
He explained Dnipro’s strategic significance to the Russian dictator. “Dnipro was the R and D centre for the Soviet Union. It is where all the fuel was made. It is where the factories were. It is where they built the Black Sea fleet along here in Mykolaiv. Putin wants this. There is a lot of industry here which Putin hits quite frequently. A lot of the time he just hits the office buildings. Most of it is underground. I do not hear much damage, only superficial.”
On the battlefield situation, Pinner offered a measured assessment that contradicted recent claims by Donald Trump that Ukraine is militarily defeated. “There is no definitive way one way or the other it is going to go at the moment. What Ukraine have done is essentially made it a level playing field. If you go back to two or three years ago, just before Trump’s inauguration, we were scratching around for artillery shells. We did not even think we would be here in the summer. That has led to a lot of innovation. Drones are the battlefield now.”
He continued, “In 2026, Ukraine is firing as many drones and ballistics into Russia as it is coming back, probably more so according to the new youthful defnce minister Fedorov. Russia cannot act its will on the battlefield anymore. We are now taking back 480 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory, liberated it. We are in a far better position than we were before he was inaugurated.”
Pinner reacted with anger to Trump’s latest remarks about Ukraine. “It sent me into a hot rage. It is clear that the rhetoric has been there from the administration quite a while. When people were telling me just before he was elected that Trump could be really good for Ukraine, I was just not seeing it. JD Vance in recent weeks has said his finest moment was stopping aid to Ukraine. That means you are helping Russia.”
He described Trump’s press appearance as a debacle. “Short of Trump actually saying that the Russians have taken something, it seemed like a debrief out of the Kremlin. Ukraine are defeated, whether he got confused with Iran at some point during that. It was a bit of a debacle from start to finish, playing into Putin’s narrative. He is not on Ukraine’s side. He is not on Europe’s side.”
Pinner argued the war will likely be decided by economics rather than territorial advances. “The battlefield is probably not going to be the place where this war is won. It is going to be won politically, economically. Putin is now relying upon Trump to give him parts of Donbas. He spent since 2014 trying to take Donbas. Now it is going to be more of an economic battle. The longer this goes on, it seems to be more detrimental for Putin at the moment, not President Zelenskyy in Ukraine.”
Addressing recent remarks by a German leader suggesting Ukraine may need to accept territorial concessions in exchange for EU membership, Pinner was blunt. “Not good. You have got to remember my wife as an example has lost a house in Crimea. Her family is stuck in the occupied territories. Did he stop then? No. He went into East Ukraine, took her house in Mariupol when she moved there to avoid the Russians. There are millions of us who are displaced. He is not going to stop. He is going to regroup and he is going to carry on.”
He expressed fury at JD Vance’s characterisation of the war as haggling over territory. “That set everybody raging here. This is six million internally displaced refugees. Four million of them left the country. We have now got 1.3 million of Putin’s own countrymen as casualties from this war, either dead or killed. Not to mention the Ukrainians. What if we give up territory? What are we going to do about the people that are waiting for us to come back? This is a Russia that is already forcibly recruiting fighting age males in the occupied territories to fight against their countrymen.”
On reports of cannibalism among starving Russian units, Pinner said he had no personal knowledge but found it plausible given the logistical collapse on the front. “It is not surprising that when they cannot get water and they are drinking puddle water and desperately need food, if you want to survive essentially, I do not think it is in the realms of impossibility.”
He also highlighted the systematic theft of Ukrainian grain from occupied territories, a trade he said directly funds the Russian war machine. “If you are taking stolen grain, you are funding the Russian war effort. That is as simple as it gets. Business and war seem to be crossing over at the moment inside Ukraine, with no morals.”
Pinner, who was subjected to torture in a Russian filtration camp, condemned what he called the whitewashing of Moscow’s crimes. “They put me in a Nazi style filtration camp in the east of Ukraine and started electrocuting and torturing me. I was in prison with a 19 year old train driver who they just thought might be Ukrainian. They have starved people as part of this systematic torture. Yet this is all being whitewashed.”
He added, “Since Trump’s inauguration, the targeting of civilians has considerably gone up. Now they are hitting the cities because they cannot make inroads on the battlefield. They are now trying to break the will of the people.”
Asked what it would mean to walk back into Mariupol a free man, Pinner said, “It would be amazing. Literally I would go and try and find my phone. I plopped it in a puddle somewhere to try and get my blogs and see if it is still there. I did a blog all through Mariupol, which is why I want to get it back. It will be really interesting to get that back and look back at that if we do get into Mariupol.”
He concluded with a reflection on the moral stakes of the conflict. “It is a war on terror now by any other name. It is ethnic cleansing at its highest. It is terrorism. People just do not want to even mention the word genocide. We have lost our moral compass in the world to a degree. But if you think the world has lost any sort of humanity, come to Ukraine, because I have seen some of the best bits of humanity in Ukraine.”
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