Beaten, a retreat: cautious hope in Kherson

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Hello, and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. In London, I'm Jason Palmer.

And in New York, I'm John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

In Britain, rail workers did it last summer. Royal Mail workers will do it later this month. Nurses, midwives and teachers may join them. The country faces its biggest wave of strikes in decades, setting the stage for a winter of industrial discontent.

And Shyam Saranegi was a schoolteacher in a remote Himalayan village in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. His life was long but relatively undistinguished, except for one thing. He was the first person to vote in newly independent India.

But first. Today, residents in the Ukrainian city of Kherson may have some cause for hope. Russian troops, according to the Kremlin, are leaving. In recent weeks, Ukrainian commandos have advanced at speed through the region surrounding a strategically and psychologically important city, posting videos of liberated towns and villages. The Russians, it seems, are on the run. That should be cause for celebration. But in an address this morning, Ukraine's President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, set a cautious tone. The enemy does not bring us gifts or make gestures of goodwill, he said. Ukrainians must fight their way through. Mr. Zelensky may be right to urge caution. The city of Kherson, the only Ukrainian provincial capital Russia has captured, isn't yet in Ukrainian control, and many officials fear a trap. But if it does change hands, that could mark a turning point both for Ukraine and for President Vladimir Putin.

In the past week in Kherson city in the south of Ukraine, it's become increasingly clear that the signs of Russian power in the city were ebbing away in various ways.

Shashank Joshi is our defense editor.

First, we saw the news that Russia had completed its evacuation of civilians over the river to the east. Then, on November 3, Ukrainians in Kherson woke up to find many of the checkpoints in the city that were previously manned by armed soldiers were now abandoned the city's administrative buildings no longer flew the Russian flag. Some of them looked deserted. And we saw videos of groups of Ukrainians filming themselves wandering through this eerily empty city with ransacked offices. But it wasn't until yesterday that the Russians confirmed that they had issued an order to effectively withdraw from not just Kherson City, but the entire area west of the Dnieper river, effectively leaving the city open for liberation. If they really are leaving, how did.

We get here, do you think? Why is this happening now?

It's happening now because of months of pressure on the city. At the very end of August, the Ukrainians launched an offensive in Kherson. The city sort of sits on the west bank of the Dnieper river, so it needs to be resupplied over the river with a pretty small number of bridges. And what happened throughout the summer was that the Ukrainians used their long range, very precise US Supplied rocket launchers that we've talked about before, Jason, to basically hammer the bridges to making it very difficult for the Russians to resupply their forces over the river in the city. And month after month of that relentless pressure, combined with a sense of low morale, a sense that this was not a sustainable position, finally has given way to what looks like a Russian decision to get out of the city. We saw a televised statement yesterday in which General Sergey Surovikin, the top Russian commander in Ukraine, spoke to Sergei Shoigu, who is the Russian Defense minister, and they talked about the threat to the civilian population, the safety of Russian troops. Shoigu basically said this was the reason they were leaving. But we know really that's nonsense. We know they're leaving because they can no longer sustain this position at acceptable cost. And the Ukrainian noose on the city, and indeed on the west bank of the river, was tightening more and more week by week.

So if, as you say, this retreat is real, what does it look like?

Well, first of all, the Ukrainians are not convinced it is a retreat just yet. They say that this could be a ruse. They could be trying to tempt the Ukrainians into the city to trap them in urban combat. But if it is real, there's two things to remember. One of them is that this is going to be an incredibly tough operation. When the Russians withdrew from the city of Lyman in the east a month ago, they took very heavy casualties. So if the Ukrainians let them leave, that could be relatively straightforward. If they try and pursue them and attack them as they leave, the Russians could bear some pretty heavy casualties. The second thing to remember is that this is going to be a humiliation for Russia, but it will result in a more defensible front for the Russians. It will narrow the front lines, it will consolidate their forces along a smaller area, and it will basically result in a less tenuous front line for the Russians. At the same time, if the Ukrainians can advance all the way up to the river, if they can advance into Kherson City, what it does mean is that their longest range rocket artillery could begin to, to hold some targets in Crimea at risk. So that's going to be a problem for Russian railway stations, ammunition depots and other facilities.

But you mentioned the retreat could in fact be something of a trap.

There are many reasons Ukrainians are worried. One of them is that they don't know how many forces the Russians have left in the city. And they could be lured into kind of a destructive urban battle. Another reason is that they say the Russians have heavily mined Kherson, including the areas outside the city. So at least advancing is going to be quite difficult and they have to work out where the minefields are. How do you get rid of them safely? The third reason is a little bit more unusual. The Russian General Sergey Surovikin said that he had information the Ukrainians were preparing to destroy a huge hydroelectric power plant, the Nova Kakhovka Dam, that is slightly north of Kherson City. And this would cause a huge flood. Now, what the Ukrainians have said is, is that actually it's the Russians who have mined this dam and are preparing to blow it up, and that one of the reasons they might do so is to flood the region effectively making it completely impassable for the Ukrainians. That's not necessarily going to be a straightforward thing for the Russians to do, because if they blow this dam up, it's not only going to be a huge ecological catastrophe for this part of Ukraine, it is also going to cause potentially severe flooding east of the river in an area which the Russians hold and hope to continue holding. And it could also disrupt the water flow to Crimea. So this question of whether the Russians blow up the dam and perhaps blame it on the Ukrainians, I think is one of the big questions of the coming days.

So there are clearly a great many ifs at this point. But is it possible to take a view on what this means for the wider war effort?

It's a huge success for Ukraine. Kherson was the only provincial capital Russia had captured and now they've lost it again. It shows that Western support works and it allows Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, to say, look, your weapons are working. Give us more, keep supporting us. We can defeat Russia on the battlefield. But it's going to be very difficult for Ukraine to pursue the Russians east of the river, because the same things that made it difficult for the Russians to resupply themselves west of the river will make it difficult for the Ukrainians to cross it. And I think we're beginning to see some doubt that this really could be dramatically changed on the battlefield. Much more. For example, yesterday we saw General Mark Milley, who's the head the of chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, saying that there had been 100,000 Russian killed and wounded, but there had been about the same on the Ukrainian side, and that these huge casualties were perhaps a reminder for the Russians and the Ukrainians that a victory on the battlefield is maybe not achievable. He suggested perhaps this was the time for the Russians and the Ukrainians to start thinking about negotiations. But undoubtedly this is a big, big win for Ukraine regardless.

And so what does that mean for Vladimir Putin then?

The loss of Kherson is just an absolute embarrassment. A month ago, Jason, he was ranting and raving about how he had annexed these places. Kherson was now part of Russia. He would defend Russia's integrity by all available means. And here he is, he's lost it. And what's happened? Nothing. No nuclear escalation, no dramatic explosion of Western infrastructure.

He.

He's lost it and he is withdrawing, or it seems like he's withdrawing. And I think that's provoked quite a bit of anger among his nationalist base. So on Telegram, which is a social media channel, we saw fury among what we call nationalist patriots. Fury at the sense that the Russian General Staff had wasted all these Russian lives. Fury that they were withdrawing rather than advancing. And compounding the sense that people like Shoigu, Surovikin, even Putin have fundamentally botched the this war and botched their war strategy. So Vladimir Putin is in a tight spot. His regime is under pressure. Mobilization is affecting more of the Russian population and provoking anger, and he has no clear way to win this war. So I think the Putin regime is not about to fall, but I do think it is in a tighter and tighter bind.

Shishong, thanks as ever for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

In the late 1970s, the UK endured a fitful bout of industrial action. Strikes and picket line protests were relentless. Public services practically ground to a halt.

By 10 o' clock this morning, the army ambulances were on their way to London. They'd been on standby since the all out strike was threatened. But only on the hard shoulder of the M4 when actually heading for the capital, did the soldiers hear that they were to handle emergency calls.

Rampant inflation and stagnating pay culminated in what became known as the winter of discontent. Heading into this winter, double digit inflation is back and so is the industrial action. Yesterday, nurses in the National Health Service voted to go on strike before the end of the year. They're the latest of many public sector workers that feel they have no option but to head to the picket line.

So already this year we've seen the biggest wave of industrial action in decades, which started this summer on the railways.

Meehan Ridge is a Britain correspondent for the Economist.

More widely, Britain is possibly facing a winter of strikes, mostly in the public sector. So teachers, nurses, midwives, ambulance drivers, bin men, postal workers, all are voting on ballots. All have voted on whether to strike.

And this latest strike involving nurses, what do we know about that?

So nurses across the UK have voted to strike over pay, with action expected to start by the end of the year. In England, the turnout was actually too low in nearly half of NHS Trust for strike action to take place. But that still leaves quite a lot of hospitals. If strikes go ahead, and of course you don't know that they're going to until they've started, it will be the first time that UK wide action has been taken by Royal College of Nursing members in its 106 year history. And it sounds as if the action will affect routine services like planned operations like knee and hip replacements. Some district nursing, some mental health care emergency services will still be covered by nurses.

Meehan, you spoke to nurses during your reporting. What did you hear from them about why they felt they needed to go on strike?

The ones I spoke to, it was partly about pay and a rise in the cost of living, but it wasn't really predominantly just about the amount that they get paid. It's also the fact that lots of them are working more hours than they're paid for and doing so in really difficult conditions. One nurse I spoke to, who'd been a nurse for nearly three decades and used to love it, told me that her job had become intolerable. The National Health Service is under this huge pressure post pandemic, so her department was closed during the pandemic and now that it's reopened, she's facing this enormous backlog of patients who she worries about very much. And so every night she goes home with work to try and get through the backlog if she doesn't do that, she says she worries about all these patients that are waiting for care. The lasting effects of having to work through the pandemic in this way have played into this. So there were long days which meant she was absent from home when her children were off school. One of her daughters had mental health conditions. She felt that she was not being a good mother during that period. Several members of her team left and they haven't been replaced. And those sorts of stories are heard across the service.

So given that this is their experience of the nhs, this is a situation they feel they need to strike against. What would a strike actually mean for the health service as it currently stands?

So a strike now would come at a very bad time for the nhs. The prospect of strike is not limited just to nursing staff. We're talking about potentially quite substantial action across the National Health Service. So Unison, the trade union, is balloting its 400,000 healthcare workers. The Royal College of Midwives will hold a ballot again very shortly. The GMB union is balloting more than 15,000ambulance workers. Figures published by the National Health Service this summer showed that there was a nursing shortage of nearly 47,000 workers, which is to around 12,000 nursing jobs unfilled. So for a strike to come on top of those sorts of nursing shortages would obviously be a major problem.

And this isn't just about one sector, right, moving away from health care. Where else might we possibly see strikes this winter?

So today there's a widespread tube strike in London. Basically, talks broke up without an agreement, which means that if you want to get anywhere in London, you need to travel by bus or train or walk or cycle. There's potential strikes ahead for teachers and university staff. The Royal Mail workers have strikes planned for days that are big sales pre Christmas, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And there's more action yet promised on the railways. Union boss Mick lynch promised more strikes at a rally over the weekend.

We will strike and strike again until.

We bring them to the table and get a deal. At the root of the demands from all the unions is an inflation busting pay rise.

And how likely is it, do you think, that these public sector workers will get the pay rises they're looking for?

So it's a really difficult political situation for the government. Better pay offers seem a lot less likely now that the Government's scrambling to patch up the public finances. So the treasury is reportedly mulling pay rises of just 2% across the public sector next year. So it does seem that on pay, the Government's really Pretty unlikely to say anything that nurses take. Teachers or others in the public sector Want to hear me?

And how much public support is there for these strikes, do you think so?

Polls suggest that a majority of Brits support nurses, desire at least to strike. Whether they actually support the striking if it happens is less certain. But they're less supportive of other workers, including teachers, striking. And that public support might die away once the striking starts, if indeed it does.

So at least in the short term, there isn't going to be a deal on offer that satisfies these workers.

That seems likely. But it's not just pay that's causing people to vote to strike and unions to organise ballots on striking. Britons are adjusting to the fact that they're a lot poorer than they thought they were because of rising bills. And they're not just striking for pay. Conditions are a really big issue for lots of workers in the public sector. So the rail unions are fighting for job security with a big cut to the railways budget looming. Universities are protesting against cuts to pensions and for better job security, which isn't something that British academics have enjoyed for a long time. Midwives, for example, are protesting about an exodus of experienced colleagues from the profession and looking for less stressful jobs, often in the private sector.

And minh Britain isn't the only country that's had to deal with pandemic shortages and chaos and inflation. But the prospect of industrial action does seem more severe there than in most places. Why do you think that is?

Europe is facing the possibility of a winter of strikes too. There are workers in France and Germany and Spain, but there it's more evenly spread between the public and private sectors. And in Britain it seems a lot more widespread. You know, there are estimates here that something like 1.7 million workers could strike, and that would have quite a big impact because so many of them are working in the public sector in crucial roles, particularly in the health service. But even if strikes don't go ahead in these large numbers for whatever reason, perhaps there'll be better pay offers or some other kind of settlement. The sort of deep rooted discontent that unions are tapping into is something that's not going to go away anytime soon. These immediate and quite awful prospects of strikes this winter is, I think, a sign of much bigger and deeper problems.

All right, Meehan, thanks very much for joining us today.

Thank you, John.

In 2014, for the general parliamentary elections, the Indian government made several videos to encourage people, especially young people, to vote.

Ann Ro is the Economist's obituary's editor.

I bought house, didn't he? One starred an old man of 97 called Shyam Saranegi, who lived in Himachal Pradesh, right up in the Himalayas. The video showed him struggling through snowstorms to reach the polling station and how he was greeted with great joy when he arrived. Because the most important thing in Shyam Sara Negi's life was to vote, because he had been the first person to vote in an independent India. He was not a particularly educated man and he not especially important. He was a teacher in a primary school in a village called Kalpa. He had struggled himself to get through school and had passed his 9th standard exam when he was 20 years old. So he kept himself busy, really with his teaching, which he did for 23 years in the Kalpa village school, and also with bringing up a family of nine children. But he was obsessed with news, and when he was asked what his hobby was, he said it was listening to the radio. And there are pictures of him holding his heavy transistor radio up close to his ear to hear what was going on. There were a whole series of happy accidents that had made Shyam Saranegi the first voter in India. The British Raj had ended in 1947, and the elections had been set for February of 1952. But because that area of India is so high up and under for almost half the year, the government had decided to advance the date in that region. And also Mr. Negy advanced the time of his own voting, because as a teacher, he'd been drafted in to help conduct the vote, which actually meant at that time, taking the ballot boxes by mule through the mountains to various other villages. So he wanted to vote in Kalpa, his home village, as early as he could in order to set off on this rather perilous journey with the ballot boxes. So he turned up at the polling station at 6:30 in the morning, which was half an hour before the official opening time, and voted there. And he said he never felt such pride and joy as when he exercised his democratic right to have his voice heard. After all the years of the Raj, which he'd been brought up with, after being bullied about by the henchmen of the colonizing power, suddenly he was a free man to vote and India was a free country. He, however, lived in obscurity for quite a long time, for nearly 50 years before the election commission discovered that he was the first voter. And therefore he was a fairly famous person. And once he became known as such, all the political parties in India, or certainly the two main ones, wanted to claim him as one of theirs, but he wouldn't give them very much luck. He himself thought it wasn't important to join a political party, it was just important to vote. Most politicians, he thought, just wasted parliament's time by creating a ruckus and not having a serious debate on the issues that mattered to people. The issues that mattered most to him were rising prices, unemployment, the education of girls, and just alleviating poverty generally. He'd seen the government do it locally in his village, and that was very welcome. He went on voting in every single election. In fact, since that election in 1951, he didn't miss a single one. And at the age of 100, he was greeted with enormous ceremony at the polling station. The red carpet was rolled out. He was given a white scarf and garlands and a box of mementos and a flowered cap and generally celebrated with a good deal of music and dancing and fun. And he was pleased about this because he felt so seriously about exercising democratic rights that it seemed to him it was almost a religious ceremony to do so. This year the election was to be held in November. This was an election for the State Assembly. But by this time he was really very overwhelmed with physical disabilities. After all, he was 105 by that time. His legs were immobile, his knees were aching, he was partly deaf and partly blind. On the other hand, when the officials suggested rather gently to him that he might like to vote at home and just send his vote by post, he actually returned the form to them and said he would rather go to the polling station. Unfortunately, at the time he became too ill. But he still insisted that he would do his duty as a citizen. And so, after all his great record of voting, the record was kept even on his deathbed, more or less. And almost his last act was to cast his vote as the ballot box was brought to him.

Ann Ro and Shyam Sarai Neghi, who died at the age of 105.

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