A year of war: a Ukraine special

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half the price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day.

Yeah.

Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow 135 gigabytes of network busy. Taxes and fees extra.

See mintmobile.com hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. You know one of the perks about having four kids that you know about is actually getting a direct line to the big man up north. And this year he wants you to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint Mobile's unlimited wireless for $15 a month.

Now you don't even need to wrap it.

Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes. If network's busy, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.

Hello and welcome to a special episode of the Intelligence on the war in Ukraine. I'm your host Jason Palmer. We'll be examining the battlefield situation one year into the conflict. We'll talk to Russians who fled their country in the wake of the invasion and we'll sit down for Kyiv cake with one Ukrainian woman who tells us how the war has changed her. February 24, 2022. A year ago, Ukraine awakened to the sounds of President Vladimir Putin's so called special military oper operation. Russia's invasion, gunfire and strikes could be heard across the country. That morning, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed his nation with a short that a war had begun and that Ukraine was ready. A year later, early this morning, as that war grinds on, he gave another speech. Ukraine as Dybala suite Ukraina, not the.

Knula suite Ukraina Obiedokas Mozhna Skazati.

Ukraine, he said, has surprised the world, inspired the world, united the world. He described the past 12 months as a year of bravery, of pain, of hope, of endurance, the furious year of invincibility. And he said Ukraine will do everything it can to gain victory.

This year.

A definitive victory for either side seems distant. It may never materialize. But judging by the state of things on the battlefield, Mr. Zelenskyy and Ukraine's forces could yet make significant progress.

For many months, Ukrainians and others have been warning about a big Russian offensive that might be looming, perhaps even timed with the one year anniversary of the war. Today.

Shashank Joshi is the Economist's defense editor.

I think the penny is beginning to drop that we are in that offensive now it's begun and to be honest, it's pretty underwhelming. Russia's army is looking very tired. They are attacking along a very broad swath of the front, but they've taken heavy casualties, they are running short of vital ammunition and over time this could soften them up in a way that allows Ukraine to mount a pretty successful counteroffensive of its own.

So bring us up to date on what the fighting looks like at the moment.

Well, Russia is predominantly attacking in the east of the country, mainly in the Donbas region on a front line that stretches all the way from Kupyansk in the north. That was a rail hub that they lost back in the Ukrainian offensive in Kharkiv in the autumn, if you recall, all the way down to a place called Vuhledar, which is still in Donetsk province. It's sort of due north of Mariupol and it sits over some pretty important supply lines that Russia uses. But the most important battle which has broadly been the case for Russia since last summer, is still Bakhmut, which is this pretty small city in Donetsk province. It's east of the more important cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. And Russia has been grinding out these pretty small gains in and around Bakhmut. And when I say small, I mean really modest. You know, we're talking 60 square kilometres or so around Bakhmut, around the nearby town of Soledar since the beginning of this year. So they're not exactly cutting through Ukrainian lines.

And you mentioned that it's come at.

The cost of heavy losses, absolutely eye popping losses. So we had a figure from British Defence Intelligence about a week ago suggesting that Russian military casualties, including those for the Wagner Group, which is a mercenary firm fighting in Bakhmut, had reached 175,000 to 200,000 casualties overall, which includes 40,000 to 60,000 deaths. And that's not surprising when you look at battles like the battle for Vuhledar, this is the town I mentioned mentioned in the south. The Russians attacked it in January. They sent some of their most sophisticated units, the 155th and the 40th Naval Infantry Brigades, which are supposedly elite units. And they are Thought to have suffered over 1,000 deaths in just two days, with an entire brigade being wiped out. So this wasn't even successful. And they basically threw away a huge chunk of their most effective fighting units.

And where does that then leave things for Ukraine? You mentioned there is something of an opportunity here, perhaps.

I think this is the big question. I'm convinced Russia is in a very bad place militarily. What I'm not sure about is Ukraine's ability to exploit that disarray. We know that Ukraine has been holding back its own reserves rather than committing them to try and block this assault. So it does have something in reserve. We don't know how big that is. We know that they might want to wait for Western tanks to arrive, particularly the German Leopard tanks that have been promised by Germany and a number of other countries. But that could take a number of months. We also know that they are suffering from an ammunition crunch of their own. That's a big problem for them. It isn't just the Russian problem. And I think one question for them is timing. Do they go soon and try and exploit Russia's weakness? Do they wait until the Western arms have arrived? But there are also doubts I am hearing, and my colleagues are hearing, that maybe Ukraine's army hasn't really proven itself in the ability to conduct big, complex offensive operations above the level of a brigade, which is a pretty big formation. So there are certainly Western officials who are skeptical of Ukraine's ability to storm through Russian lines. And what they worry about is a protracted conflict in which perhaps Ukraine can take back some of its territory, but Russia still hangs onto lots of it. And the war drags on and on.

And on with those doubts in mind about the complex operations question, if it were you, is now the time to try or sit and wait and see how things go? Wait for tanks, et cetera?

If I were advising the Ukrainian General Staff, which I'm not, and if I was, the war would have been lost with Putin marching through Kyiv a year ago, then I would wait, because I think that the Russian army is going to take a while to sort itself out. This is not something that can be done in a month or in a month and a half. It needs new ammunition. It needs to train up lots of mobilized men who are poorly disciplined. It needs to sort itself out and reset. So I think Ukraine has a little bit of time. I think it's in Ukraine's interest to build up a bigger stock of ammunition to wait for the tanks to arrive, just as importantly, to allow training to occur. It's getting training at what we call the combined arms level, in other words, not just individual units, but teaching those units how to work together by US Forces in Germany. And I think all of that's going to take a while. So I would be thinking that the optimal time for a Ukrainian offensive is perhaps early summer. So I think the Ukrainians have a little bit of time to sort themselves out.

So if that spells eventually is something of a pause here, a regrouping, what should happen in the meantime? What can the west, for example, do while things remain unclear?

Well, Jason, as my colleagues have said until they're blue in the face on this show in past weeks, Ukraine needs more ammunition, particularly artillery ammunition. But setting that aside, I think that one of the paradoxes of this campaign is that for so much of last year, we said Ukraine needs this capability, whether that's tanks or jets. And people said, ah, well, that won't yield any fruit for another six months or another eight months. So there's no point. And then of course, in six or eight months time, we find ourselves wishing we had done it and wishing we had laid those building blocks in place. I think we have to learn from that. We have to be beginning the really long processes that take a long time, but we need to start doing them now. And I would say the two most important ones are long term training of Ukrainian forces and things like fighter jets. Ukraine is going to need an air force and it'll take a long, long time. If we start that now, then look, this could actually be useful by the time we start getting on this show and talking about the great winter offensives of 2024. The time to begin doing this is now. Not waiting to see how things unfold because all of this takes such a long time.

And winding back a bit now on the anniversary. What has all of this conflict taught you about the region, about Ukraine, about NATO and its support?

Well, it's taught us a lot of stuff we need to do better, particularly the sheer demands of modern industrial scale warfare. You know, the average life expectancy of a Ukrainian fixed wing drone at the beginning of this war was about six flights. So, you know, you can imagine you would chew through European drone fleets in a matter of days at that kind of rate. But I think it has also highlighted a bunch of stuff we are really, really good at. It has expunged, maybe in some ways the ghosts of Afghanistan and Iraq in the sense that we failed to train those armies adequately to resist Islamic State or to resist the Taliban. But the military aid we have given to Ukraine has made a profound and transformative difference. If you look at intelligence, it has expunged the ghosts of the WMD debacles of 2003 around intelligence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Because here's a case where we obtained the Russian war plans using secret intelligence, publicized it, exposed the Kremlin's intentions this time last year, and basically left the Russian invasion exposed and embarrassed. So while while there's a lot of stuff we need to do better and improve and lessons are being learned, I think it's also a moment for Ukraine's allies to look at this and reflect and say they have done a lot of things very well indeed.

Shashank, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks for having me.

Jason Shashank has a lot more insights to share. One year into the war, he'll be part of a live digital event later today, which is exclusively for registered users and subscribers of the Economist. A look back at the past 12 months of the war. Join our editor in chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes for an in depth discussion about the state of the conflict and the risks of escalation. The event starts at 4pm London time, 11am Eastern time, 8am Pacific. If you're not yet a subscriber, you really are missing out. Or just register and Then go to economist.com subscriberevents to reserve your place.

Well, my name is Gregory Svedlin and for the last, I would say 11 years I've been director of charity organization the Shelter in Russian.

And I remember Grigory Sverlin is a Russian activist who ran charity for the homeless. And he really captured what Russia as a civic nation should be like. And the state understood that as well. But they were really worried about how people like Grigory meant that the Kremlin ultimately would lose control of the society.

Arkady Ostrovsky is the Economist's Russia editor.

And that's why some five years before the war he told me he went into an office of a local official in St. Petersburg. He was told that he was attracting too much attention.

Quite bright lady. But in the end of the meeting she said we should lower our voice. Other way. She will drive over me on the tank.

Very quickly Russian civil society started to grow and it went through a period when people started to care a lot more about each other and started to donate to this charity.

Then these bastards started this war and this temperature went down lower than ever, at least for the last, I don't know, 70 years.

So Grigory went out on the streets, and he was protesting. And he very soon received a warning that he will be arrested imminently.

I decided that there is no other way. I have to live.

Grigory is just one of the hundreds of thousands of Russians who fled from repression and the war their country had started. He is now in Georgia. I've spoken with dozens of Russian exiles, mostly around Europe, as well as many brave individuals who have stayed in Russia. Their exodus has had a ruinous effect on Russia's future. It's the biggest loss of brain. It's the biggest exodus of the Westernized educated class since the 1920s, and it feels just as self inflicted. It's clear that Russia's borders were not threatened by any outside power. Russia is a nuclear country, and it's also a massive one. Russia stretches 11 time zones, and it certainly didn't need any new territory.

There's a certain irony there that there wasn't any external threat, and yet Mr. Putin has blamed everything on external forces. Really, this was a problem he had with what was going on inside the country.

That's absolutely right, Jason. Because the society was changing and not in the way that he wanted. Young people didn't want to watch television, they didn't want to. All this propaganda coming at them, they didn't trust it. And encouragingly, in the years before the war, if you ask the young people in Russia what they thought was important, their sense of the importance of the freedom of speech, for example, has gone up massively, from 34% in 2017 to 61% in 2021. They were more tolerant towards LGBT rights. They traveled the world more. They didn't buy into Putin's idea of Russia being a besieged fortress. And perhaps most dangerously of all, for Putin, despite all the propaganda, 60% of young Russians had a positive attitude towards Europe and America.

So Mr. Putin essentially engineered this war as a distraction. Why? Did he think he could win more hearts by starting a war?

No, it was not just a distraction. It was his way of reasserting his own power and the power of Russia as an empire. And because he saw it as Russia's war against the west being fought in Ukraine. And the war was both a war against the west and the war against a generation of people who wanted their country to be different. And that's what Alexander Gabouv, one of Russia's best foreign policy experts, told me.

It's part of the generational struggle. I think that it's really a war against Russia's future. And the future will be just very different now. Regardless of the outcome, if there is a Ukrainian victory, it will be a very different trajectory if February 24th have not happened.

So Gabuv is in his late 30s, and he was forced to flee Russia. He belongs to a generation of people in their 30s who really should be in power now, who should be making key decisions about Russia's future, because it is their future and their children's future. And he's been now effectively forced out of the country along with at least 500,000 others, highly skilled, socially mobile, economically politically active people. And what it has done is it really altered the balance of voices in Russia, not just to mention the impact on the economy.

You mention the economy. There surely there will be a hit to it if so many highly skilled people are on the way out the door.

Well, Russian economy has already been hit by sanctions, and it has been partly offset by the high oil prices and all the revenue that Russia got. But you're right, in the longer term, the loss of these people is very detrimental for Russia. Russia has lost something like 100,000 IT specialists. It's now bleeding human capital. A lot of young people are being now conscripted into the army, sent into the mince grinder to the front, and Russia is militarizing more and more. And what this means is that the military goals clearly now outweigh any economic rationale. It's not that Putin wants to get rid of the market economy altogether. In fact, in his speech recently, he talked about how resilient Russia is exactly because it has a market. But the truth is the country will be producing more and more shells. It will be producing more tanks and fewer things that can be consumed, and the service sector will continue to shrink.

But what about the many people you've been talking about who have left? Do they represent a resistance force outside the country?

People who've left do represent some resistance force outside the country. 500,000 people we talked about is a large number. But let's not forget that millions, tens of millions of people who oppose the war are inside the country, and they will play a decisive role. They can also help, as Grigory is doing, to get people out of the country, those who've been mobilized, those who've been drafted into the army and sent to the front lines.

The Russian state obviously is a criminal, and we will not obey laws of this criminal.

Since demobilization started, Grigory's organization helped some 4,000 soldiers escape from draft mobilization from trenches.

It's our way of striking back and our way of stopping this war.

The hope is that Putin will fail in the end in turning the country back to its totalitarian Soviet past. And these people who are now outside the activists, the resistance movement people, have different ideas about Russia, have intellectual capacity, have energy and determination to be able to build a different country when the time is right.

And you said you've been speaking to lots of people with stories like Grigori's.

Tell us more about that.

I will be investigating the stories of Grigori and many like him in a new podcast series from the Economist, the first episode of which is just out. It's called Next Year in Moscow. And the podcast seeks to find out why Putin started this most irrational and ruinous war in Russia's entire history and what he has achieved. Episodes will be released on Saturdays. So please go out and find nexty in Moscow on whatever platform you get your podcast from.

On whatever platform.

Perhaps you get the Intelligence on Arkady, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

Perhaps one of the most jarring things about being in Ukraine, especially in the east, is that the horrific stories of loss are just everywhere you look.

Sarah Lornjuk is a freelance producer and contributor to the Intelligence.

Even here in a coffee shop in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, though, people seem to be moving on. Each of their lives has changed in the last year in countless ways, right down to their morning routine.

My morning starts with I'm taking my phone before I crawl out of bed and actually checking if everybody's alive, if they are. Okay. Yeah, it's constant.

This is Kate from Kharkiv, or at least that's how I know her from Twitter there. She's tried to be a voice speaking to an English audience about the experiences of Ukrainians, but her real name is Kate Buchhovslavska.

So before we start, have you ever tried Kiev cake? Kiev cake? No, I haven't.

No.

So it's a thing, and people should know about it. Okay, sure. I try that.

Who was Kate From Kharkiv on February 23, 2022?

Just a normal girl in Kharkiv. I had a job I loved, had family I loved. We planned to maybe have children soon with my husband. That was it. I was just happily living, enjoying my life. It was a very long year for me, for us, for everyone. There was evacuation in the beginning of the war. There was a lot of funerals. That changed us, all of us. I mean, if I tell you it changed me for the worse, is that too bad? Because I feel like I've become Less of myself, less happy. Now I'm, for example, I'm afraid of phone calls. Have you ever met a person before who is afraid of when their phone ringing? Because I'm afraid that somebody died and I'm getting informed about it. So that's how it changed me, I guess.

And what made you come back to Kharkiv?

So at the beginning of the war, Russian army was very close to Kharkiv. It was almost encircled. 247 bombed. Like everything burned and exploded. And after a few weeks of living in the basement, basically I broke. I couldn't take it anymore. I decided to evacuate. My husband and brother decided to come with me, but we couldn't convince our parents. It was heartbreaking to leave behind people you love under bombing shelling. And then my mother had a stroke in mid August, I guess. Yeah, These people who are older, they can't take this much stress. This war makes them really physically sick. It's common. It's not only my mother. So we come back to. To care about her also. She's doing better. She can walk and speak. So we've been blessed.

This looks amazing.

So what is it exactly?

B Caramel buttercream. And there should be nuts. Hazelnuts. Okay. I think. Yeah, probably some hazelnuts in here. That's amazing. That's very good. I'm surprised that people outside of Ukraine all know about borsch, but no one knows about kuk. I do like borscht, but we can't plan for what we will do when this war ends. For me, we planned to have children, but that was put on hold because it's just scary to be in this vulnerable state, to be pregnant right now when you might be forced to evacuate or run or maybe you need to hide from a rocket. I'm not ready for that.

How do you keep going through all of the stress?

I mean, this situation in Ukraine, it's heartbreaking. But also Ukrainians are so inspiring. There's small nation of people with different views and different lives and how they are able to come together to resist this. That helps a lot.

After we said goodbye, Kate went home and she thought some more about our conversation. And she followed up with this voice.

Note that question about how this war changed me. I struggle to answer it because I ask this myself also often, and I don't like the answer. I'm gay. It feels like this part of me that was responsible for being happy carelessly about small stuff in life is melting away, you know? And instead of enjoying my life, I'm always on guard. That's the change. And I really hope that after the war is over that will go away and I will be able to be happy that my phone rings instead of freaking out because I immediately assume that something awful happened and I'm just going to get this news right now with this phone call. You also asked me what I want to tell the people that is listening. I want to tell how thankful we are. Like, seriously, every person in Ukraine understands that we depend on your health a lot and be appreciated more than you can imagine. Anyway, thank you.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Just a reminder of our live digital event later today with Shashank Arkady and our editor in chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes. To watch it, just visit economist.com subscriberevents the editors of the Intelligence are Chris Impey and Jack Gill, and our deputy editor is John Joe Devlin. Our senior producers are Sam Westran and Rory Galloway. Our creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Alize Jean Baptiste and Kevin Kaners and assistant producer Barkley Bram, with extra production help this week from Emily Elias and Sarah Larnyuk. Our sound engineer is Will Rowe. We'll all see you back here on Monday.