No rest for the weary: meeting Ukraine’s high command

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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.

Morocco's World cup run is over. It's been said endlessly that it's the first Arab country to reach the semifinals, but that, it turns out, is a contentious statement. We look into the debates around Moroccan identity that this World cup has sparked.

And more than a century ago, when Jews began emigrating en masse from Eastern Europe to America, they brought their food with them. The Jewish deli became a storied institution. But a new museum show asks whether it's still vibrant or yesterday's locks.

But first, The conflict in Ukraine is entering a critical stage. Troops on both sides are heading into a winter that will test all sorts of things their hardware, their supply lines, their morale. This may prove to be an inflection point to chart the months ahead. The Economist has been given unprecedented access and exclusive interviews with Ukraine's military high command, those charged with the defense of the country have shared their thoughts on the future of the conflict and the decisions that will need to be made for peace in Ukraine.

So over the past two weeks I've spoken to three men who are really at the center of Ukrainians war effort.

Arkady Ostrovsky is our Russia editor.

One is President Volodymyr Zelensky, who I spoke to in the presidential building where he had spent basically every day and many nights since 24th of February when Russia invaded. The other is General Valery Zaluzhny, who is the commander in chief of Ukrainian forces, A formidable and incredible man in many ways. And the third man I saw with my colleague Oliver Carroll is Colonel General Alexander Syrskyi, who is the head of Ukraine's ground forces and who's conducted some of the most daring operations around Kyiv and Kharkiv. And I got a sense of where we are in this war and the responsibilities and the choices faced by this man, particularly of course, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

So let's start with the president then. What was his assessment of the current situation?

Vladimir Zelenskyy seemed pretty exhausted, but also very determined. He's been talking about pushing all the way back, retaking the territory that Russia had grabbed in Crimea and in Donbas in 2014, and not just going to the 24 February lines, as some American diplomats, including Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, have suggested. And the reason for that, as Zelenskyy explained to me, is that until Russians are really out of the country, until Putin loses any interest in conducting this war in rear fencing, it will not be over. Freezing. The conflict is only waiting for it to be relaunched again. And Zelenskyy is very interesting because to him as a politician, it's very important to find the language and to find the way to describe Ukrainian victory and Ukrainian advance in very tangible terms. Because it's one thing to talk about freedoms and democracy and the choices that Ukrainians should be allowed to make, but for a lot of people it's hard to grasp. And borders is something very tangible. And he also told me that he will go exactly where his people want him to go, because you know that more than 95 or 96% of people want to occupy all their territory after.

After a Russian did it.

I think the most big they're determined to get back to 1991 Borders. And of course, that task of getting that land back rests on the shoulders of his commander in chief, Valery Zaluzhny.

Clearly we've heard the name President Zelenskyy quite A lot over this time, but Mr. Zaluzhny, not so much. Tell me about him.

Well, Valery Zaluzhny is the commander of Ukrainian armed forces and he is the man who has been conducting this war. He is 49. He was too young to serve in the Soviet army. He is the product of something that Ukraine has become a nation state, a country where agency really matters. And we talked about his style and how different it is and how different leadership is from commandership, Soviet era, Russian imperial style, command, the purpose of which is really to beat in obedience, breakdown, individual will suppress, free thinking, an initiative in many ways which is over centralized and hierarchical. And he, with very limited resources, has managed to fend off Russian forces, retake quite a lot of land, push the Russians back. And I think he surprised everybody in the world who expected the Ukrainian army to fold in the first few days of the war.

So when you spoke to Mr. Zaluzhny, did he give you a sense for how he sees the situation now on the ground?

We're now in wintertime. Ukraine has retaken quite a lot of territory, but things are slowing down from here. Both sides are absolutely exhausted. And the dilemma is very, very simple. As he put it. On the one hand, there are Russian forces who are desperate to stop Ukrainians advance, who are desperate to halt things not in order to settle, but in order to get a pause to regroup and rebuild so they can re attack. The Ukrainian forces, on the other hand, need not let them do so. But they're also bleeding, they're completely exhausted. And they too need to prepare for their counteroffensives. Ukraine wants its territory back. It needs new resources, something that General Zaluzhny has been trying to prepare. And what he said is that precisely because the Kremlin cannot achieve much success on the battlefield, it's now hitting the infrastructure, trying to affect the morale of the Ukrainian fighters by shelling civilians, leaving wives and children to freeze without water, having to evacuate. And it's one thing, he said, if your soldiers in the trenches know that their families are okay, it's quite another to have the soldiers who know that their families and their dear ones are in danger. On the battlefield. He said the biggest trouble is in Donbas. And of course that's where most of the fighting, relentless shelling, and now some assault by Russian troops have been happening and it's no win situation for Russia. But it was still exhausting his troops and stopping him from regrouping and rebuilding.

So that's where things are now. What did he say about the coming months of this battle.

Well, Zaluzhny, throughout our conversation, actually spoke about Russian side with respect. He was not dismissive. He didn't sound triumphant, not once. And he understands what lies ahead in terms of challenges. He thinks that the mobilization, which many had dismissed in the early stages, thinking Russia won't be able to carry it out, that it had nothing to equip its soldiers with, he is much more pragmatic about it. He thinks that mobilization has worked, that Russia has managed to put two to 300,000 extra men on the battlefield. And of course, some of them have no experience and a lot of them will just get killed. They are cannon fodder that Putin is throwing at this war, but a lot of them will get through and they are slowing down Ukrainian advances. And as he is trying to prepare his own resources for his own offensive in the spring, he understands that his troops at the moment in around Donbas are absolutely bleeding. And they're holding this line with sheer heroism and resilience. And Zaluzhny's big worry is what comes after this. He said a new offensive could start as soon as late January, possibly in February, and if they are lucky, in March. And he said he was in very little doubt that the Russians will try to launch attack, possibly in all three directions in Donbas, but also in the south, possibly threatening Zaporizhzhia Nikolayev and Ibn Odessa. He is almost certain that they will try to have a go at Kyiv. They are threatening him from Belarus directions to distract him. And this is what he now has to prepare for while also getting ready for another offensive. And each operation requires a certain amount of munition, of armor, of manpower. And he can calculate what he can do with the resource that he has. And that resource is limited.

So how is Ukraine going to deal with that question of resources, though?

Well, resources of consist of three parts, the manpower, munition and the weapons. He was less concerned about the manpower he does have, shortage of munition and armor. He needs a lot more for offensive action. He rolled off a sort of shopping list including tanks and long range artillery and missiles. He also needs a lot more munition. We're talking on the scale which, as he himself admitted, the west simply doesn't have. That is basically the biggest constraint, and this is the question that Zaluzhny is now dealing with, is how does he use this limited resource he has to the maximum effect? Where does he strike? And of course, a lot of it depends, as he clearly understands, on his president, Vladimir Zelensky, because It is Zelenskyy who is going out there talking to Western governments and more importantly, talking to the publics, to the nations who vote, those politicians in, trying to focus their mind, trying to explain to them how essential this is, that this is not the time to stop and get into pretty much pointless negotiations with the Russian government, which only wants to pause in order to re attack. This is not the time to do it. This is the time to push on.

So this is still a question of armaments and not one of other ways out of this conflict. There's no real prospect for peace talks or anything that isn't fought on the battlefield.

I think Zelenskyy was very clear that peace talks, in a way, is the last bit that needs to come in and they end up fighting. He is rightly worried, with all the experience that Ukraine had since 2014, that freezing the conflict will only give Putin and the Kremlin time to rebuild. And they've seen it in Donbass. Vladimir Zelenskyy is very clear that this war can only end when Ukrainians feel satisfied, when Russia withdraws its troops completely. And as he said to me, it happens in one of two ways. Either Ukraine drives them out, which will take more lives and more time and more blood, or the Russians withdraw themselves. And he also talked to me about the occupied territories. He talks about people who've been isolated from the information cut from their relatives and friends who've been under occupation, how the Kremlin and its propaganda working, like Goebbels propaganda, how it's changing people's minds. As he told me, Ukrainians in the occupied territories are a bit like astronauts who cannot take off the heavy helmets which the Kremlin put onto them and which is limiting everything they can see. So for him, restoring Ukrainian rule is not just about retaking land, liberating territory. It's also about restoring people's sense of identity and not letting Russian propaganda work. Because as he said at the very beginning of the war, the real victory is saving as many Ukrainians lives while retaining Ukrainian freedoms and their sense of identity. This is where land and identity come completely together, and the Ukrainians are fighting for both.

Arkady, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you for having me, Jason.

Arkady spoke at length with President Zelenskyy in an exclusive and personal interview in a special episode airing on December 22, he talks candidly about how his acting career has helped him shape his messaging, about his forthcoming book, and about what it's like to be a wartime leader, to hear that in depth conversation. Listen to the intelligence next Thursday.

Hi, this is Christy from Back to the Bar. You've probably heard about GLP1 weight loss medications and the side effects that can come with jumping in too fast. That's why Ilove Noom makes getting started easy. Their microdose GLP1 program begins with a smaller dose and gradually scales up based on how your body reacts. The Noom GLP1 microdose program starts at $99 and is delivered to your door in seven days. Start your microdose GLP1 journey today at noom.com, and that's n o o m.com Noom micro changes big results. Average weight loss eight pounds in first month meds and personalization based on clinical need and not available to all individuals. Medications are not reviewed by FDA for safety, efficacy or quality. Pricing based on first month only.

This year's World cup in Qatar is a milestone for Arab countries. It's the first to be held in the Middle East, a football mad region whose teams are often the underdogs. And the tournament has thrown up some huge upsets, like when Saudi Arabia beat Argentina in the early stages. And last night, in a fixture fraught with history, another member of the Arab world, Morocco, took on its former colonial power, France in a semi final and.

Lost Mbappe again and again. It hit Derry and it's in. Bellio Hernandez has struck France in front inside five minutes.

Morocco's fans applauded their team's performance.

Nonetheless, it was a great game. The Moroccan players did really well. They did their best. We honestly all think they're heroes and.

It was a tough match.

The whole Arab world is really proud of that team today.

Reasons for pride at the national level are clear cut, but looking more widely, well, that's up for debate.

Morocco are the first African and Arab squad to get as far as they did in the World Cup.

Greg Karlstrom is our Middle east correspondent.

The achievement has set off raucous celebrations in the Arab world, in Africa and among diaspora communities in Europe. But the team's success has also raised some curious arguments about Morocco's identity and its place in the region.

Arguments in what sense?

Let's start with the ones that are not open to argument. The first is that this was an African achievement, and of course it was. Look at a map. Morocco is on the African continent. It's been embraced by millions of African fans. Even the Morocco coach has talked about the team's rise in the World cup as being a historic moment for Africa. It's also an historic moment for the Moroccan diaspora, which lives mostly in Western Europe. Of the 26 members of their squad, 14 of them were born outside of Morocco. That's the highest proportion of any team in this tournament. One example, Ashraf Hakimi, a fullback who grew up in Madrid to poor Moroccan parents, chose to play for the Moroccan squad. He said he felt more affinity for the country of his heritage. And on December 6, he scored the winning penalty kick against Spain. And so, just as European football has become more diverse in recent years and has really enriched the sport, we also have now the Moroccan squad that has created its own roster of players with complex identities. The one thing that has been up for debate, whether talking to fans in cafes or in fan zones, or scrolling through social media in recent weeks, has been over Morocco's place in the Arab world.

And what's the shape of that argument?

It seems like a ridiculous argument in some ways. I mean, Morocco is a member of the Arab League. It's a country where Arabic is an official language and its culture has contributed much to broader Arab culture for centuries. Whether we're talking about modern day singers who record in Arabic, or figures from hundreds of years ago like Ibn Battuta, the famous scholar and explorer who was Moroccan born. But the question of Morocco's Arabness is something that Moroccans and Arabs have been talking about. On the one hand, you have many Moroccans who identify as Arabs, and they have been embraced by the Arab world as they have moved through the World cup over the past few weeks. But you also have Moroccans who are uncomfortable with the label. You have a plurality of the country, perhaps a majority that is of Berber descent. And to some of them, being labeled as Arab implies an erasure of their identity. The Berber language was long a second tier language in Morocco. It was only given official status in 2011 as part of a package of constitutional reforms that the King rushed through when people were getting restive during the Arab Spring.

So the center of this argument then is how much Moroccans themselves feel Arab.

There's that, and then there's also how much the rest of the Arab world considers them to be. For one thing, Morocco is quite, quite far away from the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant. I happened to be in Saudi Arabia on the night of their knockout stage victory, and I was talking to Saudis during and after the match, and one of them said this was a win for the entire Arab world, and he was jubilant about it. Another one said, really, he wasn't that excited because Morocco was as far away as Thailand. There's also a lot of prejudice aimed at Moroccans from elsewhere in the region. The Moroccan dialect sort of widely mocked for being difficult to understand. There are also some crude stereotypes directed at Moroccan women from other Arab countries. They are sort of widely maligned as being prostitutes. Some Arab countries have imposed travel restrictions on younger Moroccan women because of this stereotype. And so it's a country that even some people in the Arab world have an uneasy relationship considering part of their region.

And so clearly some part of all of this argumentation is how all of those prejudices, all of that politics, all that history gets mixed up with football on the pitch.

It is, and we've seen in this World cup how football, politics and identity can mix. Of course, this is the first World cup that has been hosted in an Arab country in Qatar. And so it's been an opportunity for many Arab fans and non Arab fans as well, to show solidarity for the Palestinian cause. We've seen fans coming to matches with Palestinian flag armbands or T shirts or actual flags, and the Moroccan squad itself has taken part of this. After their victory over Spain, the team unfurled the Palestinian flag on the pitch to an outpouring of support from people across the Arab world who of course, see Israel's half century occupation of Palestine as an injustice. It probably looked less noble to people in Western Sahara who have been under a Moroccan occupation for 46 years, but it was a reminder of the way that football and politics intersect. And it was also a reminder that of the way the Palestinian cause continues to animate and continues to play a central role in Arab identity.

And so to your mind, has the tournament been a display of Arab unity or reasons for disunity?

Despite all of the debates around identity and Morocco's place in the region? I think it's been a display of unity unlike anything we've seen in 11 or 12 years since the beginning of the Arab Spring. And I think it offers a sort of interesting version of pan Arabism. Whenever people talk about pan Arabism, they tend to hearken back to either the 1950s and 1960s, the sort of heady days of Arab nationalism, which was a very political movement as the region was emerging from colonialism. Or they go back much further and talk about the grand caliphates in the early days of Islamic. And these are visions that seem quite dated to Arabs today. Morocco's success, aside from just being a remarkable achievement on its own and the result of a lot of hard work by the Moroccan team, also offers a slightly different vision of pan Arabism. This is a squad and a country that is a mix of different identities. It's African, it's Berber, it's also Arab. It's a mix of foreign born and native sons. And somehow the squad has pulled all of these different players together and gone remarkably far in the World Cup. And so they've given Arabs across the region something to cheer. And they've also given them perhaps a newer sort of more updated vision of what Pan Arabism means in the 21st century.

Greg, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you.

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There's an exhibition running at the New York Historical Society about Jewish delis. I'll have what she's having is named after a scene in the movie When Harry Met Sally in which. Well, let's just say that the scene involves a sandwich, a deli and a full throated, if somewhat disingenuous expression of joy.

Yes, yes. Oh, oh. Oh.

Oh God.

Oh.

I'll have what she's having.

The exhibition is small, but it's imaginative, it's thorough. Of course, it's funny and it's well worth a visit. But for those of us who grew up going to Jewish delis, it has an uncomfortably funereal rise and fall feeling about it. That's not without reason. Ninety years ago, there were around 3,000 delis in New York. Today, thanks to suburbanization, assimilation and changing tastes, there are just a few dozen left. But that's not nothing. And those surviving delis inspire fierce loyalty and affection in their customers.

I converted to Judaism before I got married and converted to being a deli fan at the same time. Every time we were in the city, we would go to Carnegie and we, we loved it and were just heartbroken when it went away, really. Now the only ones we go to are Katz's and 2nd Ave. That's Dave Brunel.

I sat next to him at lunch last week at the Second Avenue deli. It's no longer on Second Avenue in the East Village. And the East Village, where my grandfather was born 105 years ago, is no longer as densely Jewish as it was. But the restaurant was still doing a brisk lunch trade.

There's nothing like it. I mean, when we started coming, it was the old Jewish waiters, you know, and they were funny. So some of that personality is gone. Not all, but, you know, there's still some of that. But, man, those are fun times. I mean, you knew you'd have a laugh and a meal. You know.

That'S part of what makes Jewish delis so special. They're aggressively informal. Hamisha, you'd say in Yiddish, home like familiar, comfortable. Waiters joke with their customers, and customers joke right back. Steve Cohen, who's managed the Second Avenue Deli for 40 years, explains how he tries to get his waiters to think.

I tell people when they first start to work here, you can look at it as either being entertained by people all day or assaulted by people all day. Now, which one are you going to have a better home experience?

And of course, there's the food. Corned beef, pastrami, smoked fish on bagels, matzo ball soup. It's not all that adventurous, but it's comforting and done right, it's just sublime. Usually before you even sit down at a deli, you know not just what's on the menu, but what you're going to order. What's your order?

I always get pastrami on rye. If it's not kosher, I may ask for some Swiss with it.

Now, the reason Dave said that is because at a kosher deli, you won't get any cheese on your sandwich. Jewish dietary law forbids eating milk and meat at the same meal. A deli purist would order pastrami on rye with nothing but mustard and a few half sour pickles on the side. But like everything else, that's up for vigorous argument at a deli, diners talk to each other. I asked Steve whether he thinks the deli is dying. Were still vibrant.

You know, it's vibrant for working. That it is. Now, it's a problem because it's very time consuming. I mean, I have vats of briskets and corned beefs because I do my own. It's a lot of work. You go into Italian restaurant, you know, they have a little pasta here, a little tomato here, a little. So in that way, it's hard. And the meat prices are at a sky high. We are kosher. So it's really. It's a problem. It's rough.

What's your secret? The secret to this deli, it's longevity. It's popularity. I mean, it's lunchtime, it's packed.

I care about the customer. We make the customer happy. I work hard for my money. I'm going to be 75 and I'm still doing this. So I want people to come here and say, you know what? They're glad to see me. I'm glad to see. I've been through a lot of life cycles with a lot of customers, and they became my friends. Deaths, births, funerals. I mean, it's, you know, unfortunate, but this is what it is. I mean, so you have to really like people.

And it helps that for some of these customers, including me, he serves food that tastes like their grandmother, like their bubby used to make. I have to say, the Kasia varnishkas did taste just like my bubby. And it was a great memory today. Thank you.

I remember your boobie. Huh? She used to pinch my cheek 20 times a day. It hurts.

Thank you so much.

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