Fear on draft: Ukraine’s fraught mobilisation

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Ora Okunbi.

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

COVID 19 cases first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan back in 2019. That much we know. But the scientists trying to find out how and why are being prevented from doing that rather necessary work, even though it could help us prevent future pandemics.

And Last year, nearly 2/5 of recorded music revenues in Japan came from the sale of CDs. CDs. We ask what's behind that ongoing love affair when the rest of the world is streaming away from physical media?

But first. Time is not on Ukraine's side. The longer the war drags on, the more dire things become. Bombing campaigns against east western Ukrainian towns and cities, particularly in the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions, are now being paired with pushes from Russian ground forces to maintain its defence. Ukraine badly needs more soldiers and more ammunition at the front line, but no one is queuing at the recruitment offices like they did in the early days, just after the full scale invasion.

So move fire when you come up. Start shooting now. Assault enemy contact.

Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed amendments to a mobilization law that was debated for months in parliament before finally being passed. The bill will require military aged men to register their whereabouts online, and it lowers the mobilization age from 27 to 25. But Ukraine also has to weigh the risk of so many young men dying in battle, so depriving the country of prospective fathers to the next generation. Can Ukraine overcome this challenge among the many others that it faces in the.

Fight for its future, Ukraine is in the balance as much as it has been at any time since the early days of the war.

Oliver Carroll is the Economist's Ukraine correspondent.

The next two months will be absolutely critical because Ukraine is facing difficulties on every side of the triangle of ammunition men and morale on ammunition. They've Been struggling to keep the Russians at bay, rationing weapons, while American politicians did their thing over six months of negotiating before sending the assistance. Now the weapons, they're coming through, but it's taking some time to filter through, first of all the warehouses and then to the front lines on men. We've seen a pretty stalled mobilization drive that has meant that generals have not been able to rotate their troops, making them more tired, more prone to mistakes. And arguably the biggest, the most important thing at the moment is morale. And this is the. The problem that's perhaps hardest to quantify.

So how are Ukrainian military officials approaching this challenge of arming while keeping people on side?

Well, I had the chance to meet with Major General Vadim Skibitsky, who's the deputy chief of Ukraine's military intelligence agency, and he seemed to be telegraphing a message essentially for people to prepare for things to get worse, perhaps much worse. As he said, our problem is very simple. We don't have any weapons. And the Russians always knew that this moment, even if the Americans passed the aid, would be that sort of difficult time for Ukraine, and they're using this opportunity to push. So essentially starting in the Donbass, which has been the center of this war for the past two and a half years, and moving northeast to Kharkiv region and Sumy, Ukraine's immediate concern is the high ground stronghold in the town of Chasivyar, which is important because it holds the keys to an onward Russian advance to the last large towns and cities in Donetsk region. Now, according to Major General Skabitsky and also other commanders in the area, it's probably a matter of time before that city falls in a similar way to Avdiivka, which fell in February, destroyed essentially by hundreds and hundreds of these new guided aerial bombs which Russia is using. So, as he said, not now or tomorrow, of course, but all depending on how quickly they can get their supplies and how quickly they can generate new reserves.

How is Ukraine bracing and preparing for these oncoming assaults?

They're generating an additional 10 brigades in which they hope to be able to hold the Russian assault back. But obviously, for that, they need to be mobilizing more people. In terms of pure numbers, conscription is not quite the problem for the army that it once was back in. For example, in December, when the mobilization process essentially stalled, it was running about a third of the target. They've now increased the level of mobilization five times as much as before, in fact. But that delay, in which parliament basically took a long time to pass what was a very controversial Amendment to the mobilization law requiring that all draft eligible men register their address their whereabouts in a new online database, which has the effect of basically telling draft officers where people are. Because in a country at war, there's a lot of internal movement, a lot of people are hiding. So that was a real urgent necessity for the military. At the same time, it's also fraying the resolve of many men across the country.

What does that shift, that fraying that you describe look like on the ground in Ukraine?

So there are many perspectives from those perhaps who are just waiting for the knock on the door to serve and they will go freely of their own accord, to others who were actively hiding. And certain cities and regions appear to be bearing the brunt of conscription efforts. In Kyiv, for example, these draft brigades, they aren't so visible. But in certain cities like Odessa and in the Carpathian Mountains, where a lot of people have been harbouring down low, that's a different story. I stumbled across the story of a bar in Odessa back in these difficult days of 2022, when tank shops were across the city and Russian warships still on the horizon. A group of philosophy students at the time, when most of the people were thinking about preserving whatever they had decided, this was the moment to realize their dream. And they opened a bar selling a limited menu of moonshine vodka, Jagermeister and homemade wine. So back in the beginning, they were talking about what they would do if Russians took over the city and how they would, you know, stage a guerrilla type partisan warfare against them. But then slowly, members of the group, the male members of the group, started disappearing. One left the country illegally. Another managed to get a medical exemption from military duty because supposedly had diabetes. A lot of the customers started disappearing, either across the border or to the east, to the front lines. And in the end, only the barmen remained.

And how many people are leaving?

There isn't an easy answer to this. But one estimate late last year suggested there were 650,000 men of fighting age who had left Ukraine, and a good part of that by illegal means. In the past, that used to be a matter of paying a few thousand dollars to a corrupt security officer. Now that's a lot harder. And people who want to do it are taking risks and taking more dangerous. Ro, The barman said that he and other men like him are now faced with this pretty impossible dilemma. On the one hand, they don't want to leave home. They understand the risks of trying to get abroad and understanding there's no way back after leaving. But also equally fearful the draft officers might Knock on the door. War is not abstract for these young men. They know a lot of people who've been sent to the front lines. They know that it's a story of ammunition shortages, of intense Russian pressure and death, essentially.

Oliver, how will Ukraine go about navigating this latest chapter in the war?

It's not all doom and gloom. There are people who are confident that they can limit the latest Russian incursion. Just very recently, I spoke with Lt. Gen. Alexander Pavliuk, who just recently took command of Ukraine's ground forces. And he certainly took a more defiant view than even Major General Skibitsky of the military intelligence. And this was despite the fact that my interview with him was rescheduled three times as there were difficulties on the front line. But he insisted the fears were overblown, that Ukraine would hang on. The message he wanted to get across was that Ukraine shouldn't be judged by those who were panicking. Russia was testing the stability of Ukraine's front lines, sure, but his outgunned soldiers are standing firm because they know what's at stake. Wherever there is Russia, there is nothing, he said. Where thriving towns once stood, now lie skeletons, corpses, ruins. That's a clarity of message that has arguably been lacking from the politicians in the last few months. But if Ukraine is to survive, certainly in the form that we know it right now, there will need to be a much more general return to the urgency of messaging that we saw at the beginning of the war.

Oliver, thank you so much for coming on the show.

It's always a pleasure.

Tomorrow on the show, we'll be taking you to the front line to examine the situation that Lt. Gen. Pavoliuk was describing and to see how soldiers there are faring at this critical moment. While many people still struggle with the debilitating effects of long Covid, for others, the pandemic itself now feels very much in the rearview mirror. But the threat of another pandemic hasn't gone away, and understanding what caused the latest one may help prevent or mitigate one in the future. Covid cases first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, and since then, scientists have been trying to work out why. But in China, that's a question they're being prevented from answering.

Anyone working on research into the origins of COVID in China has had a really difficult time over the past four years.

Don Weinland is the Economist's China Business and Finance editor.

Really, this is something that started almost from day one. So there's a lab here in Shanghai that first sequenced the COVID 19 genome not long after the genome was published online. As soon as that happened in early January 2020, that lab was shut down very quickly. And it's pretty clear that the government's thinking on this has not changed. So the same lab was shut down yet again at the end of April this year. This lab has been doing some work, we think, on the origins of COVID and its lead virologist, Dr. Jang Yong Jen, turned up for work at the end of April to discover that he had been barred from entering the lab along with his team.

So, Don, are you effectively saying that this is the end of COVID research in China?

Not Quite so surprisingly, Dr. Jiang staged a bit of a protest outside of his lab. He slept on a piece of cardboard for a couple nights. There are pictures of this circulating on Chinese social media. You can see Dr. Zhang laying down on the ground as guards watch over him. And he's posted on, on Weibo, which is kind of like China's Twitter or X, that he would not quit, he would not leave, and that he's pursuing science and the truth. These are all really quite brave statements in a society where pushing back against the official line can be risky. So it appears that Dr. Zhang has not given up.

And is Dr. Zhang still there now?

It appears that him and his team have been allowed to re enter their lab. We don't really know the details around this, but it appears that a public health authority in Shanghai has allowed the reopening of this lab temporarily. We don't know for how long. We don't know what kind of research they will be allowed to do, but I think some of this is actually connected to how big of a response the closure of the lab generated in Chinese social media. A lot of people were posting about this and a lot of average Chinese people seemed quite upset that Dr. Zhang's work would be forced to stop.

Why are the Chinese authorities seemingly so against this work?

I think a lot of it comes back to the desire to not be blamed for starting the global pandemic. So in the early days, of course, there was a lot of blame being put on China. You might remember President Donald Trump making very accusatory statements at China. And since then, the authorities here have done whatever they can to really control the flow of information on the pandemic and to avoid any kind of blame. So a lot of conspiracy theories have been hatched by spokespeople for the Chinese government. The Chinese government has called for investigations into U.S. facilities that they say may have been the origins of COVID And of course, whistleblowers here have been detained or punished. There's a very famous doctor named Liwen Liang from the city of Wuhan. This is where the virus first emerged. And he tried to alert people within his hospital and within the city of Wuhan about the dangers of this virus very, very early on. And he was essentially punished for doing that. He eventually passed away from COVID 19 not long after that. So there's been a very concerted effort by the government to make sure that they are in control of the information that is coming out of China. On COVID 19, Millions of people in this country experienced firsthand how the government attempted to shut down the spread of the virus and the spread of information on the virus. So in 2022, the entire city of Shanghai was locked down. 25 million people, myself included, were forced to stay in their homes for two months. A lot of this was really about stopping the spread of the virus. But when you lock down a city of this size, it also stops the flow of information about what is happening in the city. So within this culture of secrecy, it's really admirable to see people like Dr. Zhang pushing back against attempts to shut down labs or channels of information. Unfortunately, I think it will be very difficult for people here to do research on the origins of COVID at a time when really the world desperately needs to figure out where this virus came from.

Don, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thanks.

This is going to date me pretty badly, but I was one of the last people to move to buying CDs. I just wasn't sure they were going to stick around as a technology, so I kept buying cassettes. People couldn't understand why I was holding on to a medium that was clearly on the way out. I got there eventually and ended up with quite a collection of CDs. Not that I listen to them anymore. The ones I have left are collecting dust. Like everybody else, I've been moved to streaming, well, almost Everybody else.

In 2023, according to the IFPI, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, CDs made up only 10% of recorded music revenues.

Chris Dalariva writes about music and data for the economist.

But that 10% is largely impacted by Japan, where CDs accounted for 39% of recorded music revenues. In fact, the CD remains incredibly popular in Japan, being its largest revenue generating source for recorded music.

But why, when the rest of the world is going away from CDs?

So the first thing I might strike you is Demographics, Japan has an aging population. 30% of that population is older than 65, and that is definitely part of it. But it can't explain the whole trend, because when we look at other aging populations, like Italy, for example, where 24% of citizens are older than 65, 65% of their recorded music revenues are coming from streaming. So other factors have to be at play here.

Right. Okay, so what's the hypothesis?

So in the 1950s, specifically 1953, Japan set up this price retail maintenance system, which allowed copyright owners to set prices for certain pieces of intellectual property, which included physical products like CDs. Because of this, retailers couldn't compete on price, so consumers had less options when they were looking to purchase music. But because of this price control, those prices were also inflated. So the industry had a strong incentive to maintain the status quo and just keep printing money as long as they could.

Well, as long as they could. While there was demand for physical CDs and other physical media. Right. How does that work in the streaming era?

So in the streaming era, the price retail management system doesn't cover that. So music companies can't set prices for streaming in the same way that they could for CDs, so they would try to leverage anything they could to keep the CD relevant. One thing Japanese music companies have done is to create Perks for buying CDs. So for example, if you want to meet your favorite Japanese idol, you'll have to buy a CD to possibly get a ticket to a handshake event where you get to shake hands with your idol or do a meet and greet. These are very, very popular in Japan. And often if you buy multiple CDs, you'll have a better chance of meeting your favorite star. There are also some similarities between Japan and South Korea, where there is also this very strong fan culture. And because of that, we saw in 2023, 33% of recorded music revenues came from CDs in South Korea too.

So is that to say then, because of this kind of music idol culture that CDs will continue to be big in? Well, I'll put this in the way that my producer suggests. Big in Japan.

CDs probably won't continue to be popular forever in Japan. Despite these factors that are at play, Japanese music wide revenues have been slipping since the mid-2000s, and they've started to recover in the last few years, mostly because the Japanese have finally taken to streaming. So in 2019, CDs were 49% of Japan's music revenues. Streaming was only 18%. But last year streaming surged to 36%. And there's no reason to think that this will stop. This was largely, probably a good thing for the Japanese music industry again, because revenues had been slipping and they are now growing again as streaming has become more popular.

And good for the Japanese consumer, too.

Yes, it should be good for the Japanese consumer, too. I mean, there are pros and cons to streaming, and some people have issues with how streaming royalties work. Some people point to the fact that, oh, you know, I want to own the piece of music. I don't want to just rent it or pay for access to it. I want to get the liner notes and everything that comes with it. A nostalgic desire to go back to the past, because streaming is. It's different, and people have to get used to that. But I think for most people, the access to more music will outweigh any of the other things that they miss from the CD era.

Chris, thanks very much for your time.

Of course.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow, Sam.