I spy: meeting Ukraine’s intelligence chief

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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 transition to electric vehicles will require lots of nickel, more perhaps than has ever been mined. We look at the nascent effort to gather it from the sea floor, which we find would be far more environmentally sound than mining it on land. And in the 1930s, psychiatrists did not yet have a word to describe the strange verbalizing and distant manner of Donald Triplett. But in time, his condition became known as autism. We reflect on the life of case one. First up, though, In the story of the Ukraine war, there's now daily familiarity with the main players, Presidents Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. We've spoken about the military leaders on both sides. Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner group of mercenaries, preferred the shadows for years before bursting into the limel. Today we meet someone whose name you probably haven't heard, a young, trusted member of Mr. Zelenskyy's inner circle, someone the Russians have been trying extremely hard to hunt down.

As you can imagine, for a spymaster, meeting Kirillo Budanov was quite an experience.

Oliver Carroll writes about Ukraine for the Economist. He was given a rare chance for an interview at the headquarters of Major General Kyrilo Budanov, Ukraine's intelligence chief.

His driver came to meet us and then we went through Kyiv. Rush hour traffic, racing down the wrong side of the road, making a turning right, turning left. We didn't know where we were heading. But eventually we turn up at the headquarters of Khor, Ukraine's military intelligence in downtown Kyiv. And of course, throughout this war, throughout the 16 months of war, General Budanov hasn't exactly been hiding. He's been staying here with his wife. Through missile attacks, assassination attempts and drone strikes inside his office itself. It's a strange, weird atmosphere. Even you see this sort of sandbags blocking the windows. You have machine guns on the Floor armor all around this sort of sense of absurdity as well. You have pets there. He has an elderly frog which is swimming around in a tank, canary in a birdcage, Vivaldi playing off a YouTube playlist. All around this group of close advisors leaning in and listening to his every word. He's quite the character.

Well, tell me about him. What's he like?

Oddly charismatic, I think, is how I describe him. Direct, certainly intense. A man who certainly embraces his weirdness. But he does stay very controlled of his thoughts. He does seem to be this very determined, very resolute kind of guy who knew what his aims were, what he needed to do. And certainly with respect to Russia, which is one of the main focuses of his work, certainly his informational work, it's quite controversial. He emphasized his job was to undermine the pillars on which the Kremlin's power is built on. Security, strength and protection from war, which Russians are used to. And his whole idea is to bring the war to Russia. This is something which obviously the Kremlin is trying to avoid, but it's what makes him very popular in Ukraine.

Some of the stuff you are saying there suggests he might not be the.

Easiest guy to work for, though, certainly.

Even among his closest confidants, who are his biggest advocates, some of them called him very difficult and hard to get along with, as they told me. The younger Budanov would frequently answer back when he was in training mode. He'd tell his commanders if he thought they were wrong. But there is this real sense of allegiance to him. And his supporters do say that there's a generous side to him. Kirillo, they say, is like a machine, someone who operates without fear. An officer who has known General Budanov for decades, who I can only refer to here as Aliyag, spoke very approvingly of his ability to infect others with his fervor. And he even compared him to a snake. And he said a boa constrictor noticed. He said he knows before he goes in for the kill. He sort of hypnotizes you and he devours you. He's restrained, he's measured, he's never panicked. A master of all kinds of tricks, and all of this just at the age of 37, the youngest ever spymaster in Ukraine.

So how did he get so far so quickly?

Well, his career path is quite extraordinary. Volodymyr Zelenskyy promoted him quite unexpectedly in 20. At that moment, he really wasn't known outside, but inside the services, he was already the stuff of legend. One of his colleagues, Andrei Yousef said to me that his appointment for them was the moment they understood that Vladimir Zelensky, who at that time was considered quite weak, certainly that was the narrative. That was the point. They realized actually he knew something about national security, and that you could trust him is crucial.

No effect. Wow.

But I must. For Russia, Yusuf said, it was like holding up a red flag to a bull. And the reason for Budhana's legendary status inside the services was for a very daring raid in 2016, when he led a group to destroy helicopters in the Dzhankoi air base in then Russian controlled Crimea. And it's important to emphasize that Crimea is really the backyard of the Russian security services. For him to do that geographically was one thing, but on his way out, he engaged a group of Russian special forces, killing several of them, including a very high ranking commander. Now, the Russians later avenged that raid with several car bomb attacks of their own, which killed Kirillo, Budana's immediate superior, and, and actually nearly killed him. And since then, we've had at least 10 different assassination attempts. So that really tells you something about the regard in which the Russians hold Kirylo Budanov.

Well, and how has that effectiveness played out since he got promoted, since the.

Beginning of the war?

Well, this is really where he's come into his own. Unlike other leaders, certainly of the civilian agencies, he was one of the very few who predicted the war. And when it broke, he turned the Rybalsky island headquarters in downtown Kyiv, where we were, into a sort of center, a conveyor belt for the war. The agents came in, they were given their guns and equipment and then sent off to the front lines or wherever they had to go. He was seen in the center himself, running around with a machine gun. He was really right in the center of some of the critical operations to essentially save Kyiv from the Russian advance. He masterminded an operation in Ostomol airport, in Irpin, in Mashum. Later, he sent rescue and supply efforts into the cauldron of Mariupol. This was a time when Mariupol was completely surrounded by Russian forces and everyone believed it was impossible to get through. He played a big role in the operation to liberate Snake island, which essentially removed the threat from Odessa and began to become involved in very high profile, ultimately effective sabotage and assassination campaigns. Of course, the details of that they refused to divulge. Kirillo was always at the center of this, and he was involved in some of the operations himself. And that risk taking has worried some colleagues. Gudana Told me he only does it because he feels there's no room for mistakes. And that, I suppose, tells you something about the way he views his own role in everything. And since the war, I mean, his role has only grown. And his concentration of power has certainly made other security agencies very worried, skeptical. They fret about the amount of resources he has. And so General Boudanov has his adversaries at home, but he also has them abroad.

In what sense? How do foreign partners see him?

In various ways. On the one hand, some Western advisors do see him as this kind of straightforward, incorruptible player. I mean, corruption is a big thing in Ukraine. And with Krylo Budan, you get what you see. He's been trusted with vast swathes of US and UK intelligence, perhaps in some respects more than France and Germany. But his bravado and his sort of risky nature isn't universally welcomed. Certainly his very clearly engineered statements to undermine Russian statehood and the trolling of the Kremlin, plus, of course, these operations deep into Russia, these are very disquieting for the us, and Russia, of course, wants to believe that the US is engineering efforts to undermine its very future. He said to me that he saw nothing strange in it. Ukraine was at war. And he answered back. He said, you know, the west can criticise when it gives Ukraine the tools to completely cover its airspace and defend itself. And he sort of batted away the idea that nuclear escalation was a realistic risk at that point. He said his nine years of studying Russian aggression left him in a position to say very clearly it wasn't going to happen. And even beyond Western allies, General Boudanu is understood to be playing an even bigger role in behind the scenes peace negotiations at the behest of the President, with whom he's very much in favour.

So who else is he talking to, then?

Well, I understand that he's a conduit to secret talks with the Chinese. We certainly know he was in contact with Yevgeny Prigozhin. We Wonder how much Mr. Prigozhin might have been affected by him before his decision to lead a march onto Moscow. And it's also very clear from talking to him that he's been thinking quite deeply about the nature of post war Ukraine, the problems which any settlement might bring. There was some talk last winter that he might become the Defense Minister. As far as General Boudana's colleagues are concerned, they say he's destined for a very big role once peace comes. The question is whether he will live that long to get there.

Oliver, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you. It's always a pleasure.

In Indonesia, hundreds of thousands of hectares of rainforest have been bulldozed to get at a precious resource beneath nickel. That nickel is a crucial component in batteries. And batteries are an increase increasingly crucial component in the low carbon economies the world is building. Needs to build thousands of kilometers away and thousands of meters underwater. In the middle of the Pacific lies the Clarion Clipperton Zone, a plentiful alternative source of nickel and other metals that's been lying in wait for decades. The technology exists to mine it. Companies are poised to start. They're waiting on international authorities who haven't yet worked out how to regulate the mining, but may do so soon. Just as in Indonesia and elsewhere, there are environmental concerns to reckon with. But a close consideration of the ecosystems at risk suggests the ocean depths are a better place to get at the nickel that a far wider environmental concern will require.

So there are 340 million tons of nickel in the Clarion Clipperton Zone.

Hal Hudson is a special projects writer for the Economist.

And it exists in the form of these nodules which are just sitting on the seabed. And so collecting them really just means hoovering them up and pumping them to the surface of the sea. And 3,000 tons of nodules have already been collected. And we know that there's demand out there from the dramatic growth in electric vehicles. The big question surrounding the collection of these nodules has been can it be done in a way that is environmentally sound? And this debate has been rumbling on for many years.

So why are we talking about this now if this has been rumbling on for so long?

So on July 9, this two year window that the International Seabed Authority, which is an arm of the UN tasked with governing the seabed in international waters, has had to finalize regulations for mining that it has been working on for 29 years. That two year window, which was triggered by the island nation of Nauru, comes to a close. It does not look like the regulations will be finalized. And what this means is that after July 9, Nauru gets this new level of permission to apply for permission to mine commercially with the presumption of acceptance under the UN Law of the sea. So that's complicated and bureaucratic. And what it boils down to is that deep seabed mining is becoming a more likely prospect.

And that, as you say, is just a matter of sucking it up from the sea floor.

Yeah, it's slightly more complicated than that, of course, because this is a 4000 meter long vacuum hose. But a lot of the technology is familiar from the oil and gas industry, which extracts raw materials from similar depths. You essentially have a large robotic suction unit that drives along the seabed and hooshes up these nodules, and then they get pumped up to the surface by a support ship. The support ship cleans the nodules, dumps them into a shipping ship that will drive the nodules to shore, and then the support ship takes the sediment and injects it back under the Ocean at about 1200, 1500 meters.

But in the discussion around this in years past, the biggest question has been the environmental impacts of it. This sounds like it's a pretty brutal.

Operation for the seafloor.

It is definitely a brutal operation for the seafloor. When that robot drives over those nodules, it will very likely destroy anything that's not bacteria. But what's really important to know about the Clarion Clipperton zone is there is a very small amount of life down there. There's about 2 grams of biomass per meter squared. And if you compare that to the places on land where the nickel is coming from in massive and increasing volumes, that is the rainforests in Indonesia, which must be cleared before you can access the ore beneath them. Those rainforests have a biomass within them of at least 30 kg per meter squared. So what that means is that the biomass per unit area in the rainforest where the nickel comes from right now is thousands of times higher than the biomass per unit area in the Clarion Clipperton zone.

But I suppose environmental concerns might not.

Just be limited to what immediately gets killed or hoovered up, right?

No. And the other big concern is sediment plumes. And there's two main versions of this. One is a sediment plume that's kicked up by the robot as it crawls across the seafloor. And the other is the sediment plume that gets generated when the support vessel injects that sediment. We talked about that. It's cleaned off the nodules back under the water. And in both cases, the concern is that that sediment will clump onto the gills of various creatures in the sea, both in the Clarion Clipperton zone, but also in the case of the midwater plume, people worry that it will spread to other fisheries and it will damage those fisheries.

So is that as big or even bigger a concern then, as to the biomass that's going to be destroyed?

The impact of the plumes is probably the most uncertain thing. But in the last couple of years, there has been research on real plumes of real sediment and what the Research which was done by scientists at mit, found is that the natural turbulence in the ocean breaks up the plume of sediment that gets injected at 1500 meters much faster than they were predicting. What it doesn't do is clump together and cause this kind of thing that could lump itself into some bit of the food chain that would cause further problems. And on the sea floor, the same research team found that the plumes generated by the robot, almost none of it, rises more than 2 meters above the surface, and that it does not spread anywhere near as far as people had been worried that it would.

So, in sum, the environmental concerns around this perhaps are not so concerning. Do you think that will ring down and make development in this industry easier now that these kinds of things are being figured out?

Well, it all depends at the moment on what happens in Jamaica, because in Kingston, Jamaica is where the International Seabed Authority sits. And they are sitting right now and they are having the discussions about the mining regulations. And nobody that I spoke to expects them to suddenly say, actually, we've finished the regulations. But people say that it's possible that they could publish them by the session in March next year, in 2024. Until those regulations are published, it's quite unlikely that any companies will put in an application to mine in an unregulated environment. And the difficulty is that environmental groups have almost entirely failed to think about the trade offs of the thing they're arguing for. And they have been arguing for moratoriums on mining the deep sea. And the difficulty with this is that if you don't mine the deep sea, then you're definitely going to mine Indonesian rainforest. And if the member states of the International Seabed Authority don't take the full trade offs into account, don't think about the need for nickel and the impacts of getting it in different places, then they risk making the wrong decision.

Hal, thanks very much for your time.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

To learn more about the International Seabed Authority's deliberations and about deep sea mining's future, listen to next week's episode of Babbage, our sister show on science and technology. Look for it wherever podcasts are responsibly mined.

At first, there were words. There were so many words. Chrysanthemum was a favourite of his. Donald Triplet used to love saying that one.

Catherine Nixie is standing in for our obituaries editor Anne Rowe this week.

And Dahlia, too. He liked that one so much that he repeated it. He would shout, dahlia, Dahlia. Dahlia. And by the age of Two, when lots of children are struggling to speak at all, he could recite all the American presidents and the entirety of the 52nd Psalm. But if the words that he was saying were brilliant, what on earth he meant by them was much more opaque. When he said you, he meant me. When he said yes, it meant, pick me up and put me on your shoulders. And when someone stood on his toys, instead of saying get off, he said umbrella. And what on earth he meant by chrysanthemum was anybody's guess. He would shake his head constantly from side to side. When he met people and he liked them, he would give them numbers, not just names. If his toys weren't arranged exactly as he wanted them to be, then he would scream and scream and scream until the muscles stood out on his neck. This was probably the most upsetting thing of all. He never seemed glad to see his mother, Mary. He often seemed almost even unaware that she was there. But he wasn't unhappy. He loved making things spin. And he'd make anything at all. Blocks, books, pans, ashtrays. Anything that he could make to spin, he would spin. And when they span, he would, as the psychiatrists report on him noted, jump up and down in ecstasy. So there were lots of words in Donald's life, but what there was not was any word for him. This isn't because American psychiatry in the 1930s shied away from this sort of stuff. Far from it. The American psychiatric lexicon at this time was full of words for what they used to call nature's mistakes. Imbecile. And there was cretin, and there was lunatic, there was simpleton, and there was dullard, and there was dunce, and there was the list goes on. But there was nothing at all to describe a little boy who loved to shout the word chrysanthemum, but didn't seem to want to hug his mother. And his mother was desperate. She begged doctors. She took him to doctor after doctor, and she said, please give me a word for my son. I have to know what this is. And when Mary went to other doctors in her hometown, they knew exactly what was wrong with her son Donald. And what was wrong with her son Donald, they said, was her. Mary, the doctor told her, had been overstimulating her son with all her singing to him, all these psalms, all these songs. And they said that what Donald needed was to be away from her, and what he really needed was to be in an institution. She and her husband took their little boy and they put him in the family car, and they drove him for an hour to children's institution in a town called Sanatorium. And in a way, it worked, because some of Donald's odder behaviors did stop. So he stopped screaming, he stopped the terrible tantrums, but then he stopped absolutely everything else as well. So there was no more humming, There was no more singing, There was no more chanting. There wasn't even any more spinning. Donald just sat absolutely motionless in his regulation white shorts and shirt and did nothing. Leo Kanner was an extraordinary psychiatrist. He was an Austrian Jewish psychiatrist, and he'd come to America in the early 1930s, and he would later help hundreds of other medical professionals escape from Nazi Germany to America. He was never much of a one for putting labels on people. But then Mary turned up in his office with her husband and her son Donald. And so then he read the notes, and then he studied the boy. And then he took Donald's arm and he stuck a pin in it. And he was absolutely fascinated to see that the little boy would push away the hand that stuck the pin in him. But he didn't seem to be annoyed with the person that had done it. He didn't seem to be connecting the pin and the person. Even he could see that this needed a name. So Kammer got to work. He started to write a paper. And he knew there were some other children as well. Donald wasn't the only one, but Donald was the first. He was his case one. He noted what he called their fascinating peculiarities was the term he used. So they had what he called these islets of intelligence. They could be clever, almost brilliant in lots of ways, but then they would have these kind of seas of incomprehension that he just couldn't fathom. But he observed that they all shared one thing. And this phrase has been quoted again and again in the literature since he wrote it. He said they all had an inability to relate themselves in the ordinary way to people. There was no word in English for this at that time. So what Kanner did is he borrowed a word from elsewhere in psychiatry. And the word that he chose came originally from a Greek word, autos, which means self. And he wrote that Donald was autistic. That paper has since been cited 17,000 times. In Forest, Mississippi, the home of case one, autism's first ever diagnosed case. Nobody had heard of it. They really looked out for him. So when some journalists wanted to write about Don, they turned up and they asked to be introduced to him. And they asked some of the locals, will you kind of make an introduction to Don for us? The Locals with Southern friendliness all said the same thing. They said, sure we will. And then they said, and if you hurt him in any way, we'll make sure you regret it. Donald is not really chatty to carry on a conversation in complete sentences. He does not do. He's not gonna chit chat. He'll chit chat, but it's gonna be.

A short chit chat.

There was no hurting. Don's story became a book, the book became a film, called it in a Different Key, and Don himself is now an entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica. But to the people of Forrest, that really didn't matter. To them, Donald Triplett case one was always just Don.

Katherine Nixie on Donald Triplett, who's died aged 89. That's all for this episode of the Intellig. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is John Jo Devlin and our sound engineer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Sam Westrin and Rory Galloway. Our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Alize, Jean Baptiste, Kevin Kaynors, Barclay Bram and Sarah Larnyuk, with extra production help this week from Emily Elias, Maggie Khedifa and Peter Granitz. We'll all see you back here on Monday.

Sam.