Knocking on hell’s Dvornikov: the battle for Donbas

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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.

It's three days until France elects its president, and last night, the two candidates sparred in a spiky debate. In the latest installment of our French election series, we take a deep dive into the incumbent and still odds on favorite, Emmanuel Macron.

And what music people like, what food they prefer and what faces they find attractive varies widely across cultures. It turns out that's not the case, though, when it comes to smells. But first, Today, Russia's President Vladimir Putin claimed control of the key city of Mariupol in Ukraine's south, even though Ukrainian troops are still holed up in a steel plant. He's hoping his offensive there and in eastern Ukraine will give him something to celebrate in what he has found to be an unexpectedly difficult war. This morning, the Ukrainian army spokesperson, Oleksandr Stupin, claimed nine Russian attacks in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk had been repelled over 24 hours. Vladimir Putin has now abandoned his full scale assault on Kyiv and retreated from northern Ukraine. And with this new phase of the conflict comes new leadership. The Kremlin has put its faith in the notorious General Alexander Dvornikov, who now leads all of Russia's invading forces. It's an appointment the Pentagon says is worrying.

He and other senior Russian leaders have shown clearly in the past their disregard for avoiding civilian harm, their utter disregard in many ways for the laws of.

War, laws of armed conflict, and the.

Brutality with which they conduct and prosecute their operations. There's a track record here.

The coming weeks are likely to see some of the bloodiest battles of the war so far.

The most important change since we last spoke about this has really been in Mariupol, which is the city in The Sea of Azov.

Shashank Joshi is our defense editor.

It was besieged for weeks. Russian forces have now reduced those Ukrainian defenders to pretty much just one place. It's in a pretty terrible state. It looks like it's on the edge of falling. And Russia wants Mariupol, not just because it's part of the Donbas region that Russia now considers to be an independent state, also because it's part of what the Russians call a land bridge to Crimea, which they annexed in 2014. But they also want to take it because it is tying up around a dozen or so battalion tactical groups that the Russians would simply like to move to the north so they can go and fight in the rest of Donbas.

And so let's talk about the Donbas. The last time we talked, it looked as though Russian forces were sort of reorienting themselves eastward. What is the latest? What's been happening in that region?

Well, Russia has been preparing for this big attack on Ukrainian defensive lines. It started the war with about 120 or so Battalion tactical groups. Dozens of those are no longer combat effective. They've suffered very heavy losses of men and equipment. And so what's left is what American officials say are about 78 of these battalions. That isn't all that much when you're considering this is going up against Ukraine's most experienced and well equipped forces. And the suggestion is that Russia perhaps may be launching this offensive now rather than waiting because it wants to see results by May 9. And May 9, of course, is what Russia calls Victory Day, the day that Russia celebrates the end of the Second World War in Europe. That may be driving the decision to commit these forces piecemeal, essentially, rather than building up an overwhelming force and then striking Ukraine at once.

So we have May 9th as a possible artificial deadline for Russia to declare some sort of victory. Shawshank, how close do you think Russia is to achieving its goals?

I think it's not close at all. John, think about what Putin has to show for his war. So far he hasn't taken Kyiv, the capital city. He hasn't taken any major city in Ukraine other than Kherson, all at the cost of perhaps 10,000 dead Russian soldiers, maybe 20,000 if you believe the Ukrainians. He's lost perhaps seven or eight Russian generals. And in the last week we have seen the flagship of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, the Moskova cruiser, sunk by Ukrainian cruise missiles. This is pretty much a humiliation. So if Vladimir Putin wants to make any pretense that this war has resulted in Something of value. He absolutely has to show that he has liberated the Donbas, as he claimed to be doing at the beginning of this campaign.

And we saw Ukrainian forces fight incredibly bravely in defending Kiev in the north. Can we expect the same sort of result in Donbas?

I think it's going to be a much tougher fight for the Ukrainians, John. Donbas is very different territory. For a start. It is less urban. So the Russian forces are not necessarily going to be sucked up in these urban and suburban fights in which they fared very badly around Kyiv. The terrain in Donbas is more open. It's pretty good tank country. And it is more difficult for Ukrainian anti tank teams to slide around firing at tanks because they need cover, they need forests, they need urban areas to hide in. So all of that is going to be a potential advantage for the Russians. And Russian air power that was in pretty bad shape in northern Ukraine is probably going to be a little bit stronger in Donbas, although they still don't have complete air superiority. So there's a little bit more going in Russia's favour in Donbas than there was in other parts of the country. But the important thing to remember is they still have a huge shortage of manpower. That's a problem that is not going to be fixed very easily. The Russians have made some tactical gains, but the Ukrainians are also counterattacking. We've seen some pretty impressive counterattacks around the city of Kharkiv in the last few days. And they are going to be harassing Russia, Russian supply lines constantly.

As Russia's military strategy has changed, so has its commander. What do we know about the new military commander and could he make a difference to how the war is going?

Alexander Dvornikov is the head of a southern military district and that's the smallest of the Russian military districts. But the significance of it is that it's adjacent to Donbass. So he knows that terrain exceedingly well. He's also fought in Syria and he was the first commander of Russian forces that intervened in Syria in support of the Assad regime in 2015. In a sense, he knows about setting up a new command structure and new conditions where things are not going very well. But a lot depends on how much he is able to fix the huge number of mistakes that we saw Russian forces make in the first month of this campaign. So having Dvornikov in charge is going to help Russia's command and control. That was previously completely cacophonous. It was in disarray. But he has to cope with a number of other problems to do with Russia's tactical deficiencies, to do with problems with morale in the armed forces and problems with manpower. This is going to be a war of attrition. And I think the Russians have a number of issues in that regard.

And meanwhile, the Ukrainians are getting a steady supply of weapons from the West. How would you rate the support and how well equipped do you think Ukraine is to withstand this war of attrition?

I just wouldn't have believed that we would be seeing this level of support on a week to week basis. Two months into this campaign, just the other day we saw Joe Biden announce yet another package of hundreds of millions of dollars of arms for Ukraine. And it isn't just anti tank weapons and ammunition. The Ukrainians are now getting bigger and and heavier weapons. They're getting helicopters from the United States, they're getting anti ship missiles from the Brits, they're getting tanks from the Czech Republic, perhaps from Poland as well. Ukraine is now receiving what I think is a very substantial amount of Western intelligence, including intelligence that is probably helping it target Russian forces. So this is a Ukrainian force that, yes, has probably suffered some pretty bad attrition in the first phase of this war. But Russia is now not just going up against the Ukrainians. To me, it looks like it is now going up against the combined defense industrial capacity of Europe and the United States. And that does not look like a good gamble for Vladimir Putin to me.

All right, Shashank, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks very much, John.

Things got fiery last night in the only televised debate ahead of Sunday's vote to determine France as president. Over two and a half hours, Marine Le Pen of the National Rally and the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, hit just about every policy point, Cost of living, foreign policy, social program, programs, immigration, the country's vaunted secularism. Mr. Macron attacked Ms. Le Pen on her weak environmental program, calling her a climate skeptic. Her retort? You're a bit of a climate hypocrite. He pressed her on a big loan that her party received from a bank with ties to the Kremlin. You are speaking to your banker when you speak of Russia.

He.

He said. Miss Le Pen pointed out slumping productivity numbers, saying the guy people have called the Mozart of finance has a terrible economic record. Spirited though it was, the debate is unlikely to move the needle much. The economist's election model still has Mr. Macron as the odds on favorite. Our Paris bureau chief, Sophie Pedder, has long been following his career, his rise to power his presidency and now his re election campaign.

Last September, before Emmanuel Macron had even announced he was running for election, he spent three days in Marseille, the longest visit he'd made as a president to any city in France. I followed him around the city as he visited various sites, including a housing estate in the crime troubled northern suburbs of Marseille. There, for over an hour, he sat and listened to a litany of grievances. As the trip unfolded, it really felt in many ways like the informal launch of a presidential campaign. Later, during a speech in the gardens overlooking the port of Marseille, he spoke about the city's potential for reinvention. And it struck me, watching him give that speech in Marseille, that reinvention really had been Emmanuel Macron's big dream for France all along.

In this seventh installment of our French election series, we're going to dive deeper into Mr. Macron's background and what his first term in office could say about his plans if he wins a second.

I first met Emmanuel Macron back in 2012, when he had just been appointed Deputy Secretary General at the Elysee palace under the Socialist President Francois Hollande. He'd come from Rothschild bank, where he spent four years as an investment banker. And I was trying to understand France and French economic policy under Francois Holland. And everyone just said to me, you've got to go and speak to this guy called Emmanuel Macron. Even then, it was quite clear that he had big ideas for France and was thinking quite hard about the blockages in French society and how party politics was part of that problem. Two years later, he was appointed into government and became the Economy Minister and well known then to the public in France. And I went on visiting him frequently for the reporting. But at that time, I still really had no idea that he would later run for president. Oui, il estant de Cement Marche. In April 2016, when he set up En Marche, his party, no one really knew quite what it was. But I think it wasn't until that summer when he set off on this great march, as he called it, around France, listening to people what they wanted from France, that it began to become clear that he, he was going to run for president, which he did that autumn.

Emmanuel Macron et elut President de la Republique.

And six months later he was elected. It was really quite an astonishing moment. I mean, no one had done anything similar. You know, thinking back, this was a really bad time for centrists, liberal democratic politicians.

The British people have voted to leave the European Union. Another major story tonight, the global aftershocks after that vote in and for so.

Many around the world, it was the time when Britain had voted to leave the European Union. I don't care.

We're gonna keep winning because we're gonna.

Make America great again. I love you.

Thank you.

The previous year, America had put Donald Trump in the White House. You know, across Europe, populists were climbing in the polls, even in sober places like Sweden or Denmark or Germany. And there was Macron, this eminently reasonable, technocratic, smart young voice who seemed to offer very fresh vision for France and Europe. I think over the past five years, Macron has made France a much more business friendly, investor friendly country. If you look at the worries that French people identify in polls, it's really interesting to think back to five years ago, when in the top three you would find unemployment. It's really been a curse in the French economy. In this presidential campaign this year, it doesn't even make the top 10. I think the other thing that's changed under Emmanuel Macron has been France's attitude to Europe and its voice in Europe. It was when he was elected, a moment of pretty intense Euroscepticism both at home and within Europe. And he had this vision for what he called European sovereignty or strategic autonomy. And it's taken, I think, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and Russia's aggression on doorstep of the European Union for people to realize, I think, that a greater self reliance, greater independence is something that is in Europe's interest. And that I think has really been pushed by Macron and has to be put to his credit. But at home, Macron has struggled to unite a fractured country. It was already deeply divided when he was elected in 2017. And I think that he has struggled to, to restore hope to those who are living in the sort of deindustrialized, left behind parts of France who feel that they have been neglected under Macron's presidency. The Gilets Jaunes protests, when people took to roundabouts and then the streets wearing those high visibility jackets, were really the deepest manifestation, I think, of this division and the sense of anger at what Macron seemed to represent. It was a really nasty moment for France, but particularly for Macron himself because the hatred was so clearly directed at him. At times his effigy was hung from a noose on roundabouts or in the streets in France. And I think that this was really a low point of his presence presidency. And for him, despite his many challenges, our electoral model gives manuel Macron a 9 in 10 chance of winning re election on Sunday. Victory would be a remarkable achievement. For the past 20 years, no sitting French president has been re elected. If Macron does win, he is going to be confronted with a very difficult situation. You've got the global context of rising energy prices, of inflationary pressure, heating bills, food prices. These aren't specific problems to France, but they will make it very tough for him in his first year, there's no doubt about that. And then there are things that are much more specific to France. Macron is going to have to deal with the division in the country with those who feel that he was elected by default, that they voted for him because they wanted just to keep out Marine Le Pen. And I think he is going to have to change the way he governs France in order to show people that he is governing in the interest of everyone. Emmanuel Macron I went back to Marseille last Saturday, where Macron was holding his first rally after making it through to the final round in exactly the same garden overlooking the port of Marseille that he had been to seven months before. The city put Jean Luc Melancon, his far left opponent, ahead of him in the first round vote. But his supporters do believe he'll be re elected. When I asked one man why he was at a political rally on a Sunday Easter weekend, he told me that he was there to see the President over the finishing line. At the rally, Macron seemed hopeful too. If anything, the drama of his first term seems to have galvanized him. And watching Macron Marseille, it struck me that perhaps the reason he returned to exactly the same spot in that city was to say, if he can win over Marseille, he can win over France.

Keep an ear out for the final installment of our series on Monday, when we'll bring you the results of the second round of voting. To catch up on all of our French election coverage in one place, go to economist.com france2022.

For three years, I reported from Southeast Asia, where most countries eat some form of fermented seafood, whether it's fish sauce in Vietnam and Thailand, prahok in Cambodia, padek in Laos, and so forth. Now, I love every one of those foods I just mentioned, but a lot of Westerners find them revolting. They smell very strongly of old fish. Many East Asians, conversely, I found recoil at the smell of fermented milk, which Westerners consume regularly as yogurt or cheese. But it turns out that culturally specific smell preferences are more the exception than.

The rule around the world. For the most part, people like things based upon the culture they come from, whether it's A beautiful face, or it's a type of food, or it's a type of art. The cultural background that a person has very strongly influences what they like and dislikes.

Matt Kaplan is a science correspondent for the Economist.

Now, new research is showing that when it comes to smells, this really isn't true.

Matt, that's fascinating, but to me, you know, given how much food changes from culture to culture and how deeply smell is intertwined with food, it seems counterintuitive.

Yeah, it is. I mean, when you look at the Swedes, John, they have a dish known as Sir Straming. It's fermented herring. And when you ask me what it smells like, I. I'd tell you it smells like really nasty cat litter. Some people say it smells fecal, but to the Swedes, obviously it doesn't smell that way. They like this stuff. And so this would lead you to believe that culture influences what smells you like and what smells you don't. But Dr. Artan Arshamian, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, found that this was absolutely not so. He and his colleague Asifa Majid at University of Oxford entirely expected smells to vary by culture, expecting certain cultures to find certain smells very pleasing and other cultures to find them very displeasing. And they were astounded that it simply wasn't true.

How did they go about their research? How did they find this to be true?

The short answer is a lot of legwork. They collected 10 odors that are used in a lot of psychology studies to kind of judge what people find revolting and what people find pleasant. There's vanilla extract at the top of the list, which is very pleasant smelling. And at the bottom of the list was isovaleric acid, which you're probably not familiar with the name, but it is the stuff that makes stinky socks smell absolutely revolting. So they went to hunter gatherer communities on the coast of Mexico. They went to subsistence farmers living in the highlands of Ecuador, shoreline foragers, horticulturists living in the tropical rainforests of Malaysia. And at the end of it all, they compared their results to previous work that has been done with the same exact odors on New Yorkers. In total, they had two hundred and thirty five people who they exposed to these smells and asked them to rank them on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being, wow, this stuff smells great, and 10 being, oh my God, where did you find that? Take it away, please.

And what were the results?

As I could have Told you from the beginning, isovaleric acid is disgusting. And nearly every single person surveyed in this experiment said so. There were only a handful. Eight out of this 235 person survey rated it on a scale of one to three, saying, hey, this stuff is pretty pleasant. In contrast, the vanilla extract, only 12 people out of the whole survey that said I don't like this very much and put it at a rank between 8 and 10. This is showing pretty universally, it doesn't matter where you're from, Malaysia, rainforests, everybody seemed to agree that vanilla smells nice and isovaleric acid does not. When the researchers went to analyze this, effectively washing it with statistics, they were able to generate a result that showed that cultural upbringing accounted for just 6% of the results. This starkly contrasts with previous research which shows that the kind of face that a person finds as beautiful is very much dominated by the culture that person is raised in. More than 50% of a person's reactions to beautiful faces are governed by the culture they were raised in.

And so why do you think that is? If smells are relatively universal, why is the visual appreciation of face faces so dependent on culture?

I think the force behind it is down to tribalism. We used to live in packs with groups of people interacting closely in tight knit cultures and communities. And if you broke from that culture and went to go and breed with somebody in another population, you could bring war, you could bring social conflict, and therefore there's probably some sort of natural selective force that governs us to find faces that are similar to ours as beautiful and those that are not to be less beautiful. As to smells, well, sweet smells are found all over the world and rotten ones are found all over the world too. So there's some universalism in there and I don't think natural selection is playing on it quite as much.

All right, Matt, smell you later.

Take care.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcastseconomist.com and you.

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