Bodies in the streets: Russian atrocities

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. In New York, I'm Jon Fassman.

And from London, I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

The last chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's monster report lays out what needs to happen if the global thermometer is to match the goals set in Paris. It's not going to be easy. But among the worries, there are reasons for hope.

And in Britain, a soapy ride through an automatic car wash was a staple of 1970s life. But for a lot of reasons, the less adventurous hand car wash resurged. Now, thanks to Brexit and a pandemic, the drive-through kind is making a comeback.

First up, though. After weeks of fighting around Ukraine's capital of Kyiv, Russian forces have withdrawn to the country's south and east. In their wake, a catalog of horrors is coming to light. Russian soldiers appear to have committed war crimes on a horrific scale, including summary executions and the random killings of civilians. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has described what's happening as a genocide. He will address the UN Security Council later today. The Ukrainian prosecutor general has said that the bodies of 410 civilians had so far been found around the capital. But there's no doubt that the final toll will be much higher.

On Monday, I went to Bucha, which was a town just northwest of Kyiv, held by the Russians for about a month, from which they have retreated.

Tim Judah is covering the war in Ukraine for The Economist.

What I saw was pretty gruesome. I was taken to a children's holiday camp, and in the basement were 5 men who Ukrainians said had been tortured.

Tortured by Russian soldiers.

Yes, he was killed.

His arms are tied. I tried, yes.

And they certainly looked to me as though they'd had a very bad time and they'd been executed. These are positions that were here. Are these former Ukrainian positions or former Russian positions?

Only Russian positions. One month here, it will be only Russians.

Only Russians.

And Tim, there have been, of course, numerous reports of atrocities having been committed in Bucha. What else did you see there? What was it like being there?

We've seen with our own eyes people who have been clearly executed, people who've been shot in the head or shot in the chest, and they've had their, their hands tied or their feet tied. There are also a lot of dead bodies in the streets in Bucha. Monday I was just talking to somebody standing by his garden gate and he goes, oh, there's like two people like 3 houses down. So we went through the holes in fences in the gardens, and there were indeed just 2 dead men lying in a garden. I mean, they had probably died from shellfire, I don't know, which is bad enough. But actually, you know, what's really important now is the apparent evidence of clear war crimes, summary executions, and murders. Also, I haven't seen this myself, but my colleagues have seen dead bodies in the street who also had their hands tied. And police told colleagues that they think that the Russians arrested people and shot them in the street to make an example, because what they were really frightened of was Ukrainians using their phones to report to Ukrainian forces their positions.

And these sorts of atrocities have not only been committed in Bucha, right? Where else have you been?

Yes, that's right. I've been to a village called Motyzhyn, which is 50 kilometers due west of Kyiv. There, the Russians arrived on February the 26th. 2 days after the invasion began, and they stayed there until March 28th. And there on March 23rd, according to villagers but also now official sources, the Russians arrested the mayor, a woman called Olha Sukhenko. They also took her son, who was an adult, and her husband. After they left on March 28th, Ukrainian forces came in and they subsequently discovered in a woody area her body, the son's body, the husband's body, and the body of somebody else. And they've officially excavated it. It's a kind of sandy pit, so you can see her clearly and you can see the, see the others. But actually what officials say is that they think that there may be more bodies underneath them in that pit, but they had stopped the excavation because they're frightened of booby traps and mines. About 200 meters away, there's a kind of a drain hole, and there's a dead man in it called Gennady Merchinsky. On Sunday, his wife was there. She hadn't seen him, and it was really quite a traumatic scene. She sort of looked down the hole and she said, "Yes, well, that's him," because you can see his tattoo. He was sitting slumped down in water up to his waist. He had some sort of black strap around his neck. If I had to make a guess, it looked to me like maybe he was strangled, but I don't know. Gennady Merchitsky's wife, Zoya Merchinskaya, she said, that they had come and taken him away. They'd taken away an old man at the same time, and then the old man had been released. And she said that she thinks that they executed him because he had pictures of destroyed Russian tanks or destroyed Russian armor on his phone. And in all of that area from Motyzhyn and then up through Irpin and to Bucha, there is a lot— I mean, really a lot— of destroyed Russian armor. Tanks, lorries, armored personnel carriers, and so on.

And what do you think the repercussions of this will be?

What's really politically explosive is the ramifications of what we've seen. President Volodymyr Zelensky showed up in Bucha and he gave a press conference and he was talking about genocide being committed against the Ukrainian people in Motyzhyn. And then at the basement where the 5 men who looked to me to have been executed were, there was an aide to the Minister of Interior making a speech again about war crimes and genocide. Side. And this will galvanize Western public opinion, but especially Western leaders, to do more to help Ukraine in its fight against Russia.

And so has it yet galvanized support? What have Western leaders said about, about these atrocities?

Well, Tony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, said that the pictures that he'd seen were a punch to the gut. In Europe, Germany's economy minister Robert Habeck has said that his country was working towards an embargo on Russian energy, although he said it wouldn't be happening immediately. And Emmanuel Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has called for further sanctions targeting Russia's coal and oil exports.

And what about Russia? What have they said about all this?

Well, Russia's Ministry of Defense, of course, instantly declared that what I've just talked about and what I've seen and what maybe a couple of hundred journalists have seen, they just said that they were, uh, fake. And they said all the photos and videos published by the Kiev regime in Bucha are just another provocation. But I've seen it with my own eyes. I've covered wars and conflicts for the last 30 years. I think, you know, it would be quite hard to mount such a complicated and, well, I'd say convincing hoax if it was one. But as far as I'm concerned, it clearly is not.

So Tim, given the horrors that we've just seen, what do you think the likeliest outcome is? What's going to happen in the near term?

Well, I think it's going to clearly redouble Ukrainian resistance against the Russians, but I think that it will definitely spur further Western help for Ukraine and further diminish Russia in the eyes of at least Western nations. I don't think it will help when it comes to talking about peace either, because it will make it even harder to reach any sort of meaningful deal and harder for the parties, or especially obviously Ukraine, to trust the Russian side, and which of course they don't, they don't trust them anyway. But I think what actually is really even more frightening is, will we see this when other places are liberated like Kherson, which is one of the few big cities that has been taken by the Russians? What will we see when the news about what's been happening in Russian-controlled areas around around Mariupol comes out.

All right, Tim, stay safe and take good care of yourself. Thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondents, take out a subscription to The Economist. Get a great introductory deal at economist.com/intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes.

Once every decade or so, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, collects, compiles, and analyzes data from leading environmental researchers worldwide. Hundreds of scientists put together a global climate report in 3 parts for the benefit of global policymakers. The first part of the panel's sixth assessment was released last August concerning the physical evidence for climate change.

It tells us that it is indisputable that human activities are causing climate change and making extreme weather events more frequent and severe.

In February, the second part focused on the impacts of climate change and what will be needed to cope with it.

Severe climate change impacts are already happening. Vulnerable people are the most exposed to climate change impacts and have the least resources to adapt.

And yesterday, after a 40-hour delay by its signatories, the last chapter was released.

It now completes the full picture of the climate crisis that is facing humanity. It is not a pretty picture.

So the third volume of this assessment report is often referred to as the solutions or the mitigation report.

Katrine Braeck is our environment editor.

For me, it's more the options report. It basically lays out the choices that governments and societies can make over the coming years and decades if they are to meet certain temperature targets. So of course, the Paris Agreement has this dual temperature target of limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial averages and striving for a target of 1.5 degrees.

You say options, not instructions.

Yeah, and that's actually really important. The scientists don't like to say this is what you have to do, and in fact, it's just not their mandate. What they say is if the planet is aiming for warming by no more than 1.5 degrees with no overshoot, so at no point in the 21st century do we pass that threshold, then in order to reach that target, these things will need to happen. If on the other hand, we aim for between 1.5 and 2, or we aim for 1.5 but we're okay with a marginal overshoot, then that implies a different pathway. And by pathway, I mean, you know, a very comprehensive look at what energy can do, at what industry does, at what happens to heating and buildings, what happens to transport, what happens to agriculture, what happens to people's diets. And one thing that the report also mentions is the potential necessity for technologies that allow CO2 to be captured, whether that's at the source, at industrial installations, or directly from thin air.

And how does that work?

So carbon capture, there are many different versions of this. You could do something as simple as planting a tree, or you can deploy technologies that say capture CO2 at the flue of a power station before it escapes into the atmosphere, or you can potentially remove CO2 from ambient air. And this is known as direct air capture, generally combined with carbon capture and storage. So you would then sort of shove it underground or put it somewhere where it then won't re-emerge and re-escape into the atmosphere. These kinds of technologies could help, depending on how they're deployed, they could help reduce ultimately the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. But this kind of technology is really in its early stages. So carbon capture and storage is one of those technologies that governments have been saying for years, it's okay, we can carry on doing this because at some point in the future we're going to ramp up CCS massively. They haven't. So is it smart to bet on those technologies now? You know, it's fair to say probably not.

And coming back to the report, dare I ask if there's anything genuinely encouraging in it?

I've just sat through lengthy press conferences and conversations with various authors on this report, and the message that they actually want to come out of this is that it is surprisingly positive. For an IPCC report because it shows that there are a lot of things that can be done. And also it shows that over the last 5 to 10 years, there's a lot of things that have been done already and there's some real wins. And of course, the massive reduction in the cost of solar and wind is a huge success story, which theoretically bodes well for humanity's ability to cope with this kind of situation. Of course, the political situation is very different.

So what are some of the main takeaways from this report then?

So the top line here really is that the window for hitting the 1.5 degrees target of the Paris Agreement is really very, very narrow. The report lays out very clearly that there are still ways of hitting the 1.5 degrees target, but that's going to take a huge effort the likes of which humanity has never seen and never undertaken before. For instance, global greenhouse gas emissions will need to peak in the next 3 years before 2025 at the latest in order to avoid more than 1.5 degrees of warming. And even if we want to have even odds of limiting warming to 2 degrees, they still need to peak by 2025. The thing that changes between the 1.5 and the 2 degrees pathways after that is how quickly emissions fall. So in the 1.5 degrees pathway, they have to fall by 43% by 2030. And in the 2 degrees pathway, they fall by a quarter by 2030. So these are changes that are enormous. And emissions today are still rising year on year. We do have, they cite in the report, 18 countries that are on a path to decreasing total emissions. But despite that, the last decade saw the highest absolute decadal rise of emissions in human history. So we're very much not on this path.

But on all of these pathways, the change that evidently needs to happen sounds pretty drastic. I mean, how— I hate to keep asking you a question like this, but how likely do you think that is?

That's obviously the million-dollar question. It's definitely not promising. This is all coming in the context of an energy crisis, so it's not looking good at all. I swap around between finding this incredibly depressing and seeing signs of hope. And there are definitely signs of hope. Whereas when I started reporting on this back in the early 2000s, this was very much a side issue for a lot of people, for businesses certainly, for governments. It has become a core issue. And I think there's a lot of good to be seen in that. I also think that the 1.5 degrees target, if I'm perfectly honest, is very, very unlikely. I don't think we're gonna hit that. But also the really important thing to remember here is that it's not just about hitting 1.5 and then walking out of the room and that's it. And we either hit 1.5 or we don't. And if we do, then that's great, and if we don't, then we're screwed. Every fraction of a degree counts here. And so every little bit that's done in order to decrease future warming actually makes a real difference in terms of the impacts, in terms of the amount of sea level rise that you're going to see on low-lying states, in terms of the amount of human migration that you're going to have as a result of that. The destruction and the damages from extreme weather events, the impacts on agriculture and agricultural productivity and food security. I am constantly talking about 1.5 because that's the rhetoric, but it's not just about 1.5. It is ultimately about bending the curve. It's about bringing the thermostat down as much as we possibly can. And we have this 1.5 that people are moving towards, but it's not— Just about the destination, it is all about the journey.

Katrin, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

Last month, sand kicked up from the Sahara Desert settled across much of Europe. In the Alps, it turned ski runs orange. And by mid-March, it had got all the way to London, where raindrops left dusty imprints on The Economist's office windows. Like everyone else's, our car was covered with the stuff. Now it needs a wash. For me, an inconvenience. For Britain's car washing industry, a gold mine.

Folks in the car washing industry say that these dust storms are the thing that really boosts their revenue.

Joel Budd is The Economist's social affairs editor.

One chief executive of a car washing firm that has about 800 automatic car washes in Britain says that these dust storms increase car washing revenues by about a quarter as everybody rushes to car washes to mop off the dust. But the important thing that's happening now is that people are going specifically to automatic car washes and not to hand car washes.

That is to say that before now, the automatic car washes hadn't been doing very well?

Yes. Automatic car washes appeared in Britain in the 1970s, and they did really, really well in the '70s and '80s. And it really seemed like the future. It seemed like this was going to be the way that cars were kept clean forever. But then they started to decline, and they actually became less numerous.

I must say, I remember the adventure of going through the automatic car wash. But when did that boom finish? How did that boom play out?

GUY SPIER] Well, in the early 2000s, kind of a couple of things happened. One was that Britain suddenly had working-class migration from Eastern Europe. And so, we suddenly had here a real surge of working-class people, very often men, who were looking for a job that they could do without really knowing very much English. The other thing that happened is that petrol stations, where car washes are often located, started to turn themselves into convenience stores. And they needed more room because they were selling coffee and bread and things like that. And so, car washes began to disappear. Britain went from a country where cars were washed by machine to a country where cars were washed by immigrants. It's a really rare example of de-automation. Generally, once you create a way for machines to do a job, you don't go back to having people. Do the job manually. But that did happen with car washing.

But what you're saying suggests that automatic car washes are enjoying a renaissance. What's made that happen?

I think two things. One is simply Brexit. Although we have a large number of Eastern Europeans in Britain, we don't anymore have new unskilled Eastern Europeans because the flow of such people ended when the new Brexit immigration regime came into effect. And because working at a car wash is a pretty crummy job, you're very, very often exploited and paid less than minimum wage. Really, only very new, unskilled immigrants will do it, and we simply don't have new, unskilled immigrants anymore.

But you said there's two reasons at play. What's the other?

The other thing that happened was the COVID pandemic, and the government simply closed hand car washes, so their workers drifted away into other things. People also became really reluctant to use cash to pay for things. And hand car washes always use cash or nearly always use cash because it allows them to dodge taxes.

Whereas the automatic ones take cards.

Yes, they've improved. So you can wave a credit card at a machine and it will start up for you.

So if the hand car washes have disappeared, are disappearing, is that to say that there's more of the automatic ones to pick up the slack?

Yes. So I talked to the head of one of the biggest automatic car washing machine firms in Britain. They've got about 800 of them. And he said that their revenues in 2021 were 15% higher than they had been in 2019 before COVID arrived. So it seems that the demand for car washes is probably fairly constant. And given that the cheap hand car washes have disappeared. Britain is moving back into the machine car washing era.

Thanks very much for joining us, Joel.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode. Of the intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch at podcast@economist.com.

We'll see you back here tomorrow.