Capital offence: the battle for Ukraine

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The last of England's Covid restrictions have been lifted this week, and much of the rich world may be heading in that direction. We look at the calculations governments are making and ask whether or not they're moving too soon. And lots of people like to dismiss romantic comedies, but box office and streaming numbers show there's ravenous appetite for them. A new book picks the genre apart, showing them to be more than just heartwarming fluff. They're a cultural force. First up, though, The war in Ukraine has entered its second day, and there are casualties on both sides of the conflict. In one exchange, a Russian warship approached the tiny Snake island in the Black Sea and demanded repeatedly that the Ukrainian soldiers guarding it surrender. In response, one of those soldiers told the Russian vessel to go fuck yourself. Shortly after, the promised Russian bombardment came and all 13 Ukrainian soldiers were killed. That defiance was matched yesterday by Oksana Markarova, the Ukrainian ambassador to America.

The combat spirit of Ukrainian military is high. We are fighting, we will be fighting. We are protecting our home, and we will not stop.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has commended what he called the heroic Ukrainian defense. But while this is no walkover, Russian forces have made rapid gains. The Ukrainian government has confirmed that Russian troops have breached the northern outskirts of Kyiv with armored vehicles advancing towards the heart of the capital. In a video address, Mr. Zelensky made a direct appeal to the Russian people to call off the invasion, But Mr. Putin seems intent on taking the country.

So Russian forces have come in on three sides. They've come up from the south, and you've had motorized columns advancing far up northwards. You've also had Russian forces taking the land bridge over to Crimea, avoiding cities. Then you've had a drift eastwards from the Russian border towards Kiev, and then down south from Belarus, and you've had a large number of strikes all over the country.

Edward Carr is the Economist's deputy editor.

The thing that's going to happen today, I think is going to be the closing in on Kiev. And it's clear that what Russia wants to do is to take the capital city and to impose its own government.

And what about Ukrainian resistance to all that so far?

Well, my sense is that Russia used relatively light forces yesterday, perhaps expecting that Ukrainian resistance would just kind of crumble and that they'd meet almost none of it. And in fact they have met resistance. There'd be individual acts of peroism which Volodymyr Zeletsky, Ukrainian's president, has recognized and has celebrated. There was an airport outside Kiev, the capital city, that the Russians took and then the Ukrainian forces took back. You had Ukrainians this morning blowing up bridges to try and slow the Russian advance on Kiev. And I think in all of this there's just the beginnings of what might turn out to be a Russian miscalculation, which is Vladimir Putin's assumption that Ukraine really didn't exist as a nation, that it was a kind of invention. But actually it does exist as a nation and it's fighting as a nation. That does not mean it will win, but it does mean that it's putting up substantial resistance.

And as this has played out, what has the response of the Ukrainian people been?

One response was for people to head west by any means possible. And there's been a movement out towards Lviv and then they'll be going across the border into EU countries. And then inside Ukraine, I think there's been an enormous sense of shock, partly because people hadn't believed that it was going to come to this. And then of course there are attacks. And although the Russians have been trying to avoid a full on assault of civilian areas that they have attacked them. So people are scared. I was talking to our people in Kiev just this morning. The city is very quiet now. Shops were open yesterday, supermarkets, pharmacists. There was still food. And I think that amidst all of that is the sense that this is also the forging of a nation. That perhaps Vladimir Putin expected Ukraine to implode and collapse at the first assault, but that hasn't happened. There is a sense of pride and a sense that people are fighting for the survival of their country and that unites them.

And what about on the Russian side? It's not clear how much appetite there was for this war on that side. How have people reacted there?

I think it's really interesting to compare the mood in Russia today with the mood in 2014 when Vladimir Putin took back Crimea. There was jubilation in 2014 and there hasn't been jubilation today there have been protests in many cities in Russia, which is a brave thing to do these days, and hundreds of people have been arrested. I've also seen messages from Russians, including Russian diplomats, who say they're ashamed of what's happened. I don't think any of this means that the attack won't continue. It doesn't mean that Vladimir Putin is not in control. But I think there's the potential for a very interesting dynamic here, which is that the more violence Ukraine is subjected to by Russian forces, the worse it is for Putin at home, because there's this sense of Russians killing their brothers and sisters.

How has the response been from America, NATO, its allies? Will anything exert some pressure on him there?

There have been a series of sanctions announced last night in the us, the EU and earlier in the uk and these sanctions, by the standards of financial services, are pretty severe. The US has sanctions against 80% of the Russian banking system by assets slightly less than that in the eu. They Brits, who sanctions only three Russian individuals after the declaration of independence or recognition of the breakaway states in eastern Ukraine has now acted against 100. And there's been high tech sanctions imposed by the Americans on a fair tranche of Russian industry. All of this will have an effect. But I think it was an illusion to think that Saxons will stop Vladimir Putin. He knew Saxons were going to be imposed if they'd been threatened. They had to be imposed, otherwise the west looks like a paper tiger and Putin only moves on further from Ukraine and they will over time have a weakening effect on the Russian economy and that will limit and constrain Vladimir Putin's ability to be aggressive in the future.

But what about in the nearer term? Is there a chance of Western involvement on the ground?

No, it's perfectly clear Western forces will not be deployed in Ukraine and I think that's right. It is exceedingly dangerous if two nuclear powers come into direct conflict. Instead, there's a NATO summit today and you'll see further troops being positioned in the frontline states. I'd like to see NATO's Rapid Reaction Force, up to 40,000 troops on very short notice being deployed into the frontline states to signal the the more Putin is aggressive in Ukraine, the more determined NATO will be to defend itself. And I'd also like to see money in arms going into Ukraine.

It seems like you're resigned to the idea that Putin will end up with full control over Ukraine. Is that a given, do you think?

I think it's exceedingly likely. Militarily, Russia is stronger than Ukraine. If Putin is determined, he will take Kyiv, he will impose his own government. How far west he goes from there, I think is still unclear. But Ukraine and Ukrainian fighters have a vote in this, too. And if he thought that this was going to be a very simple operation that kind of Ukraine would collapse and crumple, I think he's miscalculated. And so I think he can do this. The question is at what price and at what price at home for him.

Edward thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

This week, a special episode of the Economist asks. Our interview show assesses the global fallout of the war in Ukraine. Our senior editors, including our editor in chief, Zani Mintin Beddoes, ask what the endgame is for the Russian president.

I think from the perspective of Vladimir Putin, when our great grandchildren do their history lessons, he doesn't want to be a couple of paragraphs. He wants to be a chapter. He wants there to be a chapter on Lenin, a chapter on Stalin, and a chapter on Putin. And if you want to have a chapter about yourself, then you have to try and invade a country.

Look for the Economist asks wherever the sovereignty of fine podcasts is respected. Foreign.

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This week the last of England's Covid related curbs on movement and activity were lifted in England.

We will remove all remaining domestic restrictions in law. It will no longer be law to self isolate if you test positive.

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson has decided that the time has come to live.

With COVID Mr. Speaker Covid will not suddenly disappear. So those who would wait for a.

Total end to this war before lifting.

The remaining regulations would be restricting the liberties of the British people for a.

Long time to come.

He's not alone in his thinking. Australia has just opened its borders to international travel for the first time in almost two years.

Very emotional. So I haven't seen my dad in four years, so it was great to hug him. I just haven't seen her in so long.

And it was such a big thing.

To be able to get over here.

We're so excited.

Even in New Zealand, which has had some of the strictest Covid rules, we Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has signaled that change is coming.

We all want to go back to the way that life was, and we will, I suspect sooner than you think. But when that.

With high levels of public immunity through vaccination or infection, governments are starting to make calculations very different from those of the pandemic's early days.

In the binary of are we dealing with COVID by restricting things or are we letting it play out? The British government has decided that, that it is time to move into letting it play out completely.

Hal Hodgson is on the Economist's Covid team.

The science, in a way, doesn't have much to say about this. We can say what the data says, and that is that deaths are going down. The number of hospitalizations is going down. The number of cases during the peak of the Omicron wave was four or five times the number of cases that we've seen at any other time in the pandemic. But the number of deaths was two or three times lower than the number of deaths that we saw during previous peaks. So it's a completely different world. The fact that so many people have been vaccinated, loads of people have had the virus now, and so Overall, something like 97% of people in England have antibodies to the virus. And the question, to my mind at least, is a little bit more political and almost financial, which is that these restrictions cost money. Testing people costs £2 billion a month. Do we want to spend that money carrying on testing people or do we want to spend that money on something else? And what's certain is that people are still dying from COVID It's in much lower numbers. People are still getting sick from COVID People still are going to have long Covid. And what this comes down to is the government saying the cost benefit trade off is worth it. Now, we believe, and I don't really think that science has much to say about whether that's right or wrong. It's kind of their point of view.

I'm remembering one of the COVID stories that the Economist did very early in the pandemic called the grim calculus. From what you're saying, basically the decision has come that the calculus is not quite as grim anymore.

Yeah, there's two ways to think about this as well, which is that the response to the grim calculus argument, it was kind of like too many people are dying. It's just politically unacceptable to do a spreadsheet and say, well, you know, the value of the life of all the old people who are dying isn't worth the lost quality of life for all the young people, people who are having to be locked up or wear masks in schools or whatever it is. But now we're in an inverse situation where the people making the quality of life argument are the people who are saying keep the restrictions. Because what they're saying is that the loss of quality of life for people who are still vulnerable to Covid is not worth the relaxation of the restrictions.

And these arguments are being made at a time when things seem to be at some kind of stable equilibrium. What if that changes again? We've been caught flat footed before by variants.

Yes, that is true, and it is just a bald fact that there will be another variant. What's not clear is how bad the future variants will be. The way I think about this, at least from the reporting I've done, is that it's a bit like your body's own immune system. You've got antibodies which spin up when you get a new threat to try and keep the pathogen from infecting your cells. But that response is transient. You can't keep that going forever because there's too many pathogens coming in. So what has to happen is that those antibodies disperse, go away, get eaten up by the rest of your body, and new ones come in to deal with new threats. You can kind of think about society's response to Covid in a similar way, which is to keep a reserve, what's called the cellular immune system, a deeper level, almost kind of infrastructural preparation to deal with the threat if it comes back. And I actually think that most societies in the west also have infrastructure in place that they can keep ready to spin back up very quickly. And this is really important not just for future variants of coronavirus, the one that's caused this pandemic, it's really important for the next pandemic, which is a certainty that it will happen. The only Question is when?

So Britain has been again at the vanguard of the opening up, as we had with so called Freedom Day last year. But you see this happening in other jurisdictions as well.

Yeah, and even in places that have throughout the pandemic been fairly cautious. California, where the governor has announced that the state is going to start treating Covid as endemic.

We have all come to understand what.

Was not understood at the beginning of this crisis, that there is no end date, that there is not a moment.

Where we declare victory.

And so California has lifted the mask wearing mandate for vaccinated people inside in other places. Denmark notably was really the first place to drop all restrictions. There's no requirement to isolate if you test positive for coronavirus there. Ireland is planning to drop the requirement for masks and for vaccine passports. And Australia has reopened its international border. For the first time in almost two years. The double jabbed people who want to go to Australia don't need to quarantine anymore. The unvaccinated people do still need to quarantine for 14 days though.

There is something of a countercurrent here that we're seeing restrictions actually being tightened in places such as Hong Kong, which is going to be testing its entire population on a mandatory basis next month.

Yeah, Hong Kong's a really interesting one because it is so bound to China. It faces this conundrum which is that it, if it abandons its zero COVID policy, then it faces being cut off from China because China is, as we know, maintaining a fairly strong zero Covid strategy. But it's in the middle of a big omicron spike and its government has just said that it's going to have a bunch of construction crews from mainland China come and build isolation and treatment centers with 10,000 beds or something. And this is quite interesting because Hong Kong can't be quite as strict as China is about zero Covid. And we're kind of seeing the proof of that with this big omicron spike that's going on in Hong Kong.

So taking a long view here, is this to your mind, kind of where we were always headed, that we would get a certain level of immunity. We're content with those numbers of hospitalizations and deaths. We will take them on the chin and get back to something more like normal life?

In one sense, yes. If you think about before omicron people were talking about endemicity then the idea that the virus is just gonna circulate now and it's gonna find its natural level of circulation within the community. But there's one thing you said that I don't think is quite right, which is that the current level of disease and death is what we're necessarily going to end up with. Ending the restrictions means that it is expected that those numbers continue to fall even with the ending of restrictions. The virus has its own dynamics, and lifting restrictions does not necessarily mean there's going to be a big spike in cases again and more hospitalizations and deaths. It doesn't mean that the levels are going to keep staying as they are. We can still expect, over time, with some bumps, for this virus to fade down to a level where it is part of our lives, but no longer as stressful, dangerous and scary a part of our lives as it has been for the last two years.

Hal, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you very much, Jason, for having me.

In a period marked by a needless war and a persistent pandemic. Well, even in a podcast talking about those things, you might need some light entertainment, something simple, uplifting, where you know just what you're going to get and that the ending will be a happy one. You might need a romantic comedy.

You had me at hello.

Rom coms are as loved by audiences as they are dismissed by critics. But now a new take on the genre argues there's more going on than just the orchestrated plucking of heartstrings.

Romantic comedy has had an interesting reception over the past century.

Rachel Lloyd is the Economist's Deputy culture editor.

Scott Meslo, a culture critic, in his new book From Hollywood With Love, looks at its fortunes in the past 30 years. He argues that the romantic comedy is unfairly maligned, and he makes a case for the genre's cultural importance.

It does seem like a divisive one. People have a love or hate relationship with rom coms. Why do you suppose that is? Why is it so misunderstood?

I think people respond badly to the fact that these stories are designed to have a happy ending. I think there's also an element of sexism involved. It's a genre that is for women and is written and produced by women. So I think that certainly plays a role in it. The book argues that rom coms have underlined Hollywood's success, particularly in the golden age, with films like Bringing Up Baby.

No, but if you'd only let me explain. You see, I just gave someone that bag to help.

Or Roman Holiday.

Audrey Hepburn now welcomes you to Rome.

These were films that were very, very popular and also critically successful, too, with.

Greg as the bewildered bachelor who winds up with a royal blush.

And so in holding up this thesis that they are culturally significant movies. Is it just a matter of kind of dissecting them one by one?

That is certainly what the author does. He offers potted oral histories of each film. In doing so, he offers some hilarious insight into how these films got made and also the decision making that goes on behind closed doors. Maybe you guys could like get a.

House together, buy some diamonds.

My favourite chapter was on Pretty Woman, starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere famously. But it looks at the casting choices. So at one point Al Pacino was in contention for the role of Edward, which would have made a very different film. And in fact, the script was originally a lot darker. It was called 3000 and Vivian, the character played by Julia Roberts, had a cocaine addiction. Unsurprisingly, when Disney picked up the rights, they got rid of all of that darker material and refashioned it into a sort of modern day fairy tale. Another chapter looks at There's Something About Mary and dissects the famous semen scene. Is that a hair gel? Yeah.

Great.

Almost didn't happen. Cameron Diaz didn't want to shoot it. Ben Stiller thought it was implausible and lobbied the filmmakers to introduce a backstory about the character losing sensitivity in his ear. The studio also didn't like it. They thought it was a bit too out there. And in the end the directors begged the studio to let them just film it and if it wasn't right, they would get rid of it. But obvious test audiences loved it and it's one of the most famous film moments of the 1990s.

So it's almost as if the genre is too bounded. It's not evolving enough somehow to match what people really want.

Film executives have been quite narrow minded in what they consider a romance that people would want to go and see at a cinema. For example, male executives, when being pitched Something's Gotta Give by Nancy Myers, which went on to be a huge success, they recoiled from the idea that the character would refer to the menopause.

What about birth control?

Menopause.

Who's the lucky boy?

There is a similar kind of story when it came to My Big Fat Greek Wedding as well. It's very culturally specific, but in that specificity there's also kind of universal quality.

Because nice Greek girls are supposed to do three things in life.

Marry Greek boys, make Greek girls babies.

And feed everyone until the day we die.

But lots of studio executives didn't think that audiences would like that or viewers would like that. They were wrong. It's the highest grossing rom com in history and apparently when Crazy Rich Agents was being pitched, one executive said that they thought it'd be better if they had a white lead.

So where is it going then? In the absence of that cultural analysis, of that seeming failure to innovate, I.

Think in the 21st century we're seeing a movie revival, particularly on streaming services. Netflix channeling a lot of resources into producing them because they know that audiences.

Like them junior year can hardly believe it.

Thanks, dad.

We need to talk about your sexual health.

No, no, please, no.

They've used data to find out that people watch these films and then they rewatch them and they rewatch them. The other thing that's happening in the 21st century is that television is really the frontier of the most experimental romantic stories. A particularly good example of how television has been experimental is Fleabag, at least the second season, which is a love story and it's very funn, even if it is darkly funny. But the way that it plays with rom com conventions is partly that it's a slow burn and that it's a forbidden love which follows the relationship of the protagonist with a hot priest. Just fucking tell me what to do, Father.

Neil.

And then it does away with the happy ending.

See you Sunday.

I'm joking. You're never ever allowed in my church again.

So in the 21st century, I think there's been a real revival and a real willingness to toy and tinker with what makes rom com interesting and compelling to viewers.

Thanks very much for your time, Rachel.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Marguerite Howell, Kim Gittleson and Chris Impey. And our sound engineer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Stevie Hertz, Sam Westrin, Jack Gill and John Jo Devlin. Our producers are William Warren, Rory Galloway and Alize Jean Baptiste. And assistant producer Abisoye Ocean Dairo. We'll all see you back here on Monday.