Southern strategy: the coming bid to retake Kherson

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. Today in London. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. There are now officially more than 100,000 people missing in Mexico. We ask why so many are disappearing and why that grim total has been rising so much in recent years. And we look at some new research with a surprising People who are friends tend to smell similar to one another. It's not just coincidence. It would appear people might in part choose their friends aromatically. First up, though, Russia claimed full control of Luhansk yesterday, a region in Ukraine's eastern Donbass that's the sharp focus of its campaign. Russian forces said they'd captured the city of Lysynchansk, the last Ukrainian holdout in the region. Footage released by Chechen fighters helping Russia showed them raising a Soviet flag in the city and shouting in celebration. Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, remained sanguine. We're gradually moving forward, he said. In the Kharkiv region. In the Kherson region, there will be a day when we will say the same about Donbas. The mention of Kherson is a pointed one. For all the grinding progress that Russia is making in Ukraine's east, its gains in the south may come under threat.

So Kherson is a gateway to Crimea and it's the endpoint of Vladimir Putin's land bridge from mainland Russia through to the Annex Peninsula.

Oliver Carol is a correspondent for the Economist reporting from Ukraine.

For Ukraine, it's a critical part of its economy, an agricultural powerhouse. But just as importantly, it's also a very Ukrainian inclined region. There's an additional strategic moment in that. Further down from Kherson is Nova Kakhovka, where there is a dam and a hydroelectric station which essentially provides the water for Crimea. For all these reasons and many more besides, Ukraine is prioritizing efforts to take the region back.

And what do we know about what's been happening in Kherson in the past few months?

Well, we know remarkably little from the very early days of the war. The rapid Russian advance, assisted by Ukrainiancoats, plunged the whole province into darkness. So what we do know is about life there comes from the IDPs who dare to travel over front lines, often in incredible circumstances, to reach gray zone towns like Zelenedorsk, which I visited last week. And if you speak to the volunteers there, they'll tell you that a high point around Easter time, nearly a thousand people were arriving every day. Now, because of the ferocity of the fighting and also because some of the routes coming in are now destroyed, were down to single digits. I spoke to actually a family of five very young children who, the beginning of last week, in fact, very recently decided to risk everything. The fighting becomes so intense in their village, which is right on the front line, and they traveled in a boat and then had to navigate where they essentially shouldn't have been crossing the front lines. But they said that things had got so intense then that they didn't really see a route through and that both sides were going to be fighting to the end. So certainly there is a sense that fighting is certainly increasing at the moment.

And what do we know in turn about Ukraine's efforts to take this back?

It's already clear they're pushing, albeit quite slowly, all across the front, which is a very long front going from Mykolaev region in the west, right to the Dnipro river to the east, certainly around the western side of that front line. They are getting closer. They're getting closer to Kherson City. And military intelligence tell me that their forward units are already within sniper range of the outer suburbs of Kherson. From my own sources within, some of the units there tell me they are taking villages with very little resistance. The Russians aren't putting up a fight, but it's still some way short of a fully fledged counter offensive. Essentially, the Ukrainian soldiers will readily admit they don't have the ammunition, the weaponry systems, the infantry required for a full push. The books say you need three to one advantage. They're nowhere near that. And Ukraine remains obviously very focused on fighting in the east where essentially Russians are pushing very hard. It's also not going to be easy in terms of the Russians have had a long time to prepare and there is a lot of evidence. I saw photographs, reconnaissance officer showed me some of the positions the Russians had dug in concrete reinforced bunkers. And some of the villages had multiple air defense units surrounding them. And an additional problem is that there's a lot of locals who've remained behind. The vast majority of these are too old, too infirm, too poor, too stubborn to move. But some of them, certainly from what the soldiers were saying, are also collaborating with Russia. So that creates an extra level of risk.

Collaborating in what way?

Well, according to the soldiers accounts, at the beginning of war, girls as young as 15 were recruited by the Russians. And there was one particular case in early June, Sergei, a reconnaissance soldier said that they'd found a 40 year old artillery spotter in a completely random way. In a search. They looked at his mobile phone, they saw it was nearly clean apart from one computer game. They decided to go back to his apartment and search out his apartment where they found USB drives and other incriminating evidence. And when they searched a little bit further, they found that the computer game was not in fact a computer game, but it was an application which was basically a tool to record Ukrainian military coordinates and receive cryptocurrency payments. So yes, on the one hand, this Russian advance has been chaotic and disorganized, but they do have the technological advantage over the Ukrainians in many respects.

Do you have a sense for how much that kind of collaboration would make a material difference to Ukraine's efforts here?

These aren't great numbers. These are individual cases which are unlikely to tip the balance. But even in the towns along the border that I visited, the locals were very reluctant to speak to me. Not because they were pro Russian, pro Ukrainian. They just were looking both ways. They weren't sure about who was going to be in charge in a month, in two months, in three months, people were still very much on tenterhooks, looking both ways, not sure what will happen. And there is already a lot of talk of tremendous losses, even among the Ukrainians. So while the narrative certainly from the Ukrainians is they are pushing and this counterattack is about to happen. It doesn't look to be a very clean operation, at least so far.

And so we're talking about an area in the south, the land bridge to Crimea. But most of the talk in the past weeks has been about the east, where Russia seems to be making steady progress. Is it the case that Ukraine has accepted Russia's dominance there?

I wouldn't put things in such stark terms. Ukraine certainly is outgunned still, even despite the deliveries of Western equipment, it still outguns perhaps 5 to 1, whereas before it was 10 to 1. The Ukrainians are also running out of ammunition for the Soviet produced equipment as well. The focus appears to be slowing down Russia's advance in the east as much as possible. And on Saturday, Ukrainian troops retreated from Lysychansk in Lugansk province. It seems that, you know, the Russians have finally taken Luhansk province after many, many months. And the Ukrainian calculation again appears to be to inflict as large a cost on that advance, on that very slow advance, and then to retreat quickly before the situation gets critical. So you avoid a Mariupol or a Debaltzova like situation where your troops are encircled, and for the most part they seem to be doing that.

But as regards the push in the south, what should we be looking for? What do you expect to see in the coming weeks?

Ultimately, it will come down to a calculation of which side is able to get the hardware in quick enough. Russia still retains the upper hand in hardware in artillery systems. And there is a big question whether Ukraine's Western weapons can come quick enough. And they certainly haven't been coming quick enough so far. And there is certainly some confidence that once they get these systems in place, they can strike at logistics, they can strike at supply routes, and they can strike in a way which would prevent Russia from moving its forces easily from the east to the south around Kherson. But the fight is only just beginning and things could turn very, very ugly. I mean, for the most part, up until now, Russian soldiers have not been committing the kind of atrocities we saw in north of Kyiv, at least that we know of. And certainly there is an argument which would suggest that they've been doing that because they were of the impression that Kherson and Assad would remain Russian controlled. But if that was to change and they were to be to quick retreat and partisan resistance were to increase, then things really could get very ugly and very quickly.

Oliver, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

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Having a disappeared son, a daughter, a relative, is death in life. Araceli Rodriguez is from Mexico. Her son Luis angel is missing. She speaks of uncertainty, of a loss frozen in time. You can't overcome something that cannot be closed. She says her story is surprisingly common in Mexico. Disappearances during wars or under autocracies are sadly common. But in a democratic and relatively peaceful country, the numbers have grown to shocking levels.

So in May this year, Mexico's register of missing people, that's people who've officially been registered as missing and haven't been found, whether dead or alive, surpassed 100,000 cases.

Sarah Burke is our Mexico City bureau chief.

Now, that tally dates back back from 1964, but the number has really skyrocketed in the last 15 years, since 2006, to be precise. More than 80% of these people on the register went missing since then. And the number is probably higher. People going missing, being taken, it's just an endemic problem in the country. Many people are lost and are just not found again. And when they are, it's often dug out of a mass grave somewhere in the desert.

So why has it got this bad?

I mean, so in the 1990s, from the 70s to the 90s, there were relatively few missing people. And they were taken by the government who'd been fighting left wing militants. And some cases still involved the state, but almost all of them now it's because of the war on drugs, which started in 2006. So at this point, the government decided to really crack down on the groups and take out their leaders and crisis group. A think tank estimates that this just caused the groups to splinter and they doubled in number between 2010 and 2020. Splintering has caused more violence, and some of the abductions is about getting rid of rival gang members. But now this phenomenon covers a vast number of different situations.

What do you mean? What situations? Beyond gangs.

So it could be gangs taking each other. It's also forced recruitment where they take people to work for them, so they keep them alive. Women and children are now accounting for a rising proportion of cases. And they're suspected to be taken for trafficking purposes. Now, they tend to be younger girls who are taken between 10 and 17, as opposed to in their 20s.

Soy Maria Luisa Nunez Barojas, fundadora del colectivo vos de los de parecidos en Puebla.

One woman I spoke to, Maria Luisa Nunez, she had a son who went missing in 2017. De fosas clandestine. She said she tracked him down herself doing an investigation and found him in a clandestine grave in 2020, or told the police that's where they would find him, along with five. The genetica. They only finally identified his body this year. Between 2006 and 2016, more than 2,000 clandestine graves were found. And Mexico's forensic surface has this huge backlog of 52,000 unidentified bodies. I mean, a lot of the people on that register of missing people are probably dead.

And so with these numbers getting so grave, what's the government doing about it?

So successive governments have failed to address the violence sparked by this war on drugs. The current president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who's been in power since 2018, has a strategy known as hugs, not bullets. And that seems to be making the problem worse. So he thinks he can tackle crime with welfare programs, which is disputed by many people. And he's also told the army not to confront gangs. So they're sort of left to go about their business. Obviously, tackling them in the way of taking out kingpins doesn't seem to work. Not confronting them doesn't seem to work. So there needs to be a new security strategy, because currently it just feels like there's none. And also an increased sense of impunity for not only gang members, but for other criminals as well.

So you said that the disappearances that happened between the 70s and the 90s could be sort of squarely blamed on the government in a way. It seems like this spike now could at least indirectly be blamed on the government.

Well, let's be clear. This is really mainly a problem of organized crime. But, yes, the state is not doing anything like what it should be doing in many places. They remain indifferent or in denial in the authorities. Until recently, some police would refuse to acknowledge or take reports from people who wanted to report people missing, at least until many hours had passed. And the first hours are very important for finding someone. There's friction between different agencies that holds things up. Searches don't happen. Well, almost no one is brought to trial for doing these crimes. So the UN reckons only 2 to 6% of people who are taken actually have a prosecution associated with it. Some of this indifference is because people who disappear are often poorer or more disadvantaged members of society. And so lots of Mexicans or officials suggest that they're on the wrong path. And they. These are bad guys. Some of them are. Some of them are gang members. But that doesn't excuse the crime. And sometimes the problem is simply a lack of resources. In some estimates, it would take the forensic services 35 years to deal with a backlog of all the dead bodies they have if all their capacity were directed at this and not dealing with murders that are ongoing every day.

So the way you're laying this out makes it sound as if the government is just sitting on its hands here.

Well, it changed in the 2000s, so it started to recognize this was a problem. And in 2017, there was some big legislation passed that set up national search commissions, local search commissions tidied up. The register, gave a better definition of the crime. And so since then, more has been done. This year, there's been an amendment to that law that's setting up a National Human Identification Center. So a center focused on identifying dead bodies and a DNA database. So things are slowly getting better. But compared with the magnitude of the problem, there remains a lot to be done.

But given the scale of the problem as you've laid it out here, and the fact that it is changing so slowly, that leaves a lot of people still stuck not knowing.

Yeah, I mean, hitherto and until today, the lack of state support means that groups mainly made up of female relatives, often mothers of the missing, have done the work that the authorities fail to. They're known as colectivos. And some of them are simply support networks. Others actually do things like dig in fields to look for hidden graves. So they also hold workshops, they investigate cases, they help draft laws. They're really the pressure on the government and work like the government should be doing to solve this problem. Maria, the mother we talked to earlier, leads one of those collectives. She said no one in the state did very much to help her. Some state governments are doing more, but, you know, the continued existence of the collective says a lot about the continued failings of the state.

Thanks very much for joining us, Sarah.

Thanks, Jason.

What is it that draws you to the friends you make that makes you, you know, click? Shared values. Sure. Or shared history. A similar sense of humor always helps. It's a complicated business, and there's probably more going on than new acquaintances even realize, including, it seems, their smell.

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have provided evidence that friends actually smell Alike.

Abby Bertix writes about science for the Economist.

In albeit a fairly small sample of individuals, they've shown that friends are more likely to smell similar to each other than random strangers are. They've also gone a bit further, showing that people might pick friends partially based on how they smell.

How exactly did they come to this conclusion?

So they found 20 pairs of established same sex, non romantic friends. And they meet each person wear a T shirt for two days straight. They weren't allowed to use like smelly soap or deodorant or anything that would change the scent. Then they collected these T shirts and gave them to some human smellers. They also used an electronic nose which uses some metal oxide gas sensors to essentially get at what a computer would smell the T shirt as, because computers don't have subjective experience like humans do. And these human smellers and also this electronic nose machine all smelled these T shirts. To determine how they smelled, one group of human smellers were given pairs of these T shirts, one of each friend, and asked to rate how similar they smelled. Another group was asked to rate each individual t shirt on 5 Subjective pleasantness, intensity, sexual attractiveness, competence, and warmth.

So they've given these T shirts then to human smell testers and to, well, non human smell testers. What did they find?

They found that according to the humans and the electronic nose, T shirts of friends smell more similar to each other than T shirts of random strangers. So it seems like based on these T shirts, friends do indeed smell alike.

So this is more than a mere coincidence then?

Well, to figure this out, the researchers actually investigated whether these smells could be used to predict whether strangers would form friendships. So they grabbed another 17 volunteers. This time, all of them were strangers. And they gave them the T shirt to wear so that they could capture their body odor. And then they paired up these strangers to play a sort of game. This game involved them facing each other silently and trying to mirror each other's movements. After the game, they asked each participant how they felt about the other person, if they felt very similar to them, if they felt like they were reading each other's minds, how much they liked their partner. And then they asked them, did you feel like you clicked? And it turns out that based on the odor similarity between these two people, you could predict how likely they would be to click, and you could predict how similar they would feel and how close of a friendship they would feel after that, albeit short and kind of contrived silent mirroring game.

Still, though, it's an interesting finding, but it does leave you wondering why? Why would friends smell alike? Or why would people want to become friends with someone who smells like them? Is there any guess as to a mechanism here?

Yeah. One of the researchers actually speculates that there could be an evolutionary advantage to having friends that smell like you. So body odor is known to be very linked with your genetic makeup, especially with that of the immune system. And smelling others allows you to subconsciously draw inferences about the genetic makeup of other people. One of the scientists speculates that odor matching of this sort is an extended form of kinship selection. So the idea here goes that by collaborating with our friends, we help each other to get our genes out there. It's the same sort of notion of selfish gene expression, but rather than just pushing for ours, by pushing for our friends genes as well, we are kind of sneakily able to push our genes out there.

Abby, thanks very much for joining us. Us.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can drop us a line@podcastseconomist.com or leave us a rating wherever you listen. We'll see you back here tomorrow.