Square in their sights: Kharkiv under siege

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. There's lithium in them there hills, and cobalt, and copper. America's West again has minerals under the surface that are in demand, this time for a clean energy transition. We ask how to have another mining boom that doesn't leave such a nasty legacy. And our food columnist gets me out of the office to visit a restaurant that bucks a global trend of blandness. It turns out to be a chance to share some big news about the show. First up, though, Today, a Russian missile destroyed Freedom Square in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second city. It's a continuation of indiscriminate shelling that began yesterday, just as peace talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials got underway. It remains unclear just how many civilian lives have been lost. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has called the targeting of civilians a war crime, and the International Criminal Court is already investigating. Peace talks ended with no resolution, though the head of Russia's delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, said discussions would soon continue. Meanwhile, the capital Kyiv is braced for a more vicious fight, and so is Kharkiv. It's no surprise that the Russian campaign has a focus there. Besides the fact that it's well connected to the rest of the country, Kharkiv has a long history of shifting fortunes. During the 20th century, the city changed hands 9 times, falling to the Bolsheviks, the Germans, the Russian White Army, and the Nazis. Before being liberated by the Soviets in 1943.

Now Kharkov, second body blow. Vast stores of shattered German material crowned the triumph of recapturing the Pittsburgh of the Ukraine.

Eventually, it became part of Ukraine when the country declared independence in 1991. Today, Kharkiv is closer to Russia than any other large Ukrainian city. For Russia's President Vladimir Putin, It's a symbol, further evidence that Ukraine is just an appendage of Russia, unjustly snatched away by misguided nationalists. So now, for the first time in the 21st century, residents find themselves again on the front lines of an invasion.

Okay, so you wanted to know what's going on? Right now, they say there's going to be shelling soon. And they advise everyone to go to the shelter. And, well, some people Some people don't. It's scary. I'm half scared, half shocked, really. I never thought this would happen to me, to this city that I grew up in.

I figured it might be easier if I also sent you a voice memo. So if we want to chat, it's maybe easier to do it this way. And then I can keep stitching—

One of our editors, Kim Gidleson, has been speaking with a resident every day since the war began on Thursday.

My name is Dmitry. I'm 27 years old and I live in Kharkiv. That's the city that's really close to the Russian border and those regions my country is fighting over. I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of fireworks, and I remember thinking like, who the hell would launch fireworks right now? I saw videos of Russian tanks and Ukrainian tanks. I saw dead bodies in those videos, and I think those aren't fake. And my parents live near that place. It's like on the edge of the city, and I'm really worried about that. Everyone's worried. Well, Generally, even though everyone is scared, I think we're going to get through this.

Right?

As night fell on the first day of the war, Dmitry decided to stay put and not to go to a shelter.

Ah, that sounds really stressful. Just keep me updated with how everything goes for you tonight.

I saw a couple of explosions in the sky myself. It's hard to tell what it was. Probably our air defense. It was just sparkling like a tiny firecracker. Could have been pretty, actually. People also say you should turn off the lights if you're staying at home because that might help someone aim at you or something. I have no idea if it's true or not, but turns out spending a night by candlelight helps with the stress. So.

By the second day, it became clear that the city wouldn't fall as easily as Vladimir Putin had hoped.

Hey, how are you? You know, my morning started with a list of messages like, "How are you?" that I sent and received. And they say today in Ukraine, "How are you?" basically means "I love you." So the first night, at least in Kharkiv, went Relatively quiet. Some people hear distant explosions on the edge of the city, but nothing more. I'm still not used to that sound, you know. Sometimes a neighbor upstairs drops something or slams the door, and I find myself frozen, listening. A lot of people are the same. My friends told me they wake up and panic. Some can't eat and have stomachaches. All channels report Ukrainian forces giving invaders hell. My personal contacts confirm some small portion of it, and I'm not sure if I should smile when I hear Russian soldiers dying or not.

By Saturday, the third day, the heaviest fighting shifted from Kyiv to Kharkiv.

Hey, sorry for being offline for so long. It's now the third day of this war and it's not getting any easier on the nerves. I'm listening to the sirens and distant explosions all day, some not that distant. I saw a tank up close today, just casually passing by me on the streets in the middle of the city. It was Ukrainian, of course, but even after all those instructions on the channels, it's hard to tell if you're not into military stuff.

The day before, Ukraine had banned men of fighting age from leaving the country.

It sounds like they're not letting men leave the country. Do you think you'll eventually be forced to fight? And if so, I guess I'm wondering how you feel about that.

To be honest, I've never been a patriot. More than that, I despise the idea. But now I can't help but feel proud and inspired by Ukrainian military and all those who help. There is this video of a Ukrainian soldier who is just casually loading his rifle, smiling, and addressing Russian troops like— How are you enjoying our welcome so far, guys? I have watched it like 5 times in a row.

By Sunday, Russian forces briefly took control. Worried, we called Dmitry to check on him.

Hey.

Hey.

Sorry about that.

Yeah, it's okay.

You can hear me fine?

I can hear you fine. And yes, I've discovered that you have to use the app.

But as the day progressed, Ukraine's fighters expelled the Russians in an unexpected show of resistance.

I've heard gunfire with my own ears from my balcony. That's saying something, right?

That's got to be so crazy. Like, you know, a week ago, what did you think?

I mean, a week ago. A week ago, I was blissfully ignorant of, well, a lot of things. Not that I'm a specialist on that kind of stuff right now, but I never thought that would happen. I never imagined something like this could happen. I was like the happiest, blissful, ignorant fool who didn't know any better.

I think we all didn't believe that this would happen, to be fair.

Who would? I mean, that's my city. That's I grew up on this street and I could— and now there's tanks in the same place. It's surreal. They say you shouldn't go outside today because of the military sweeps and stuff like that. But well, I saw a lot of people from my window just going around their business. Well, the only business that you have outside is if they're building a barricade. Actually, um, my neighbors are building some kind of barricade from— I don't even know from what— from dumpsters and stuff. I don't think it's gonna do a lot of good, but yeah, they're organizing themselves and doing something. They're like Everyone's asking each other for fuel to create Molotov cocktails.

By Monday, Russia had changed its tactics.

Oh, there's definitely shelling. I saw a lot of pictures. I've heard a lot of people reporting that, well, projectiles hit their apartment buildings. Some injured, some dead. I don't know the exact count.

It's a breach of international law and a worrying turn in strategy.

I see that people just like me are dying. They were outside gathering supplies in the wrong place at the wrong time, and this causes a lot of emotions. The people are jumpy and anxious, but united like never before. We all help one another and try to comfort each other. This morning I met my mother and sister who live nearby, and we stood in a line at the store for 3 hours in the cold and recalled funny stories from childhood to the sound of distant explosions.

Even as Kharkiv remains a Russian target, Dmytri says he doesn't plan on leaving the city.

I am worried, but I don't panic, and I encourage everyone else not to panic. Otherwise, we'll all go to the bottom, and this is what our enemy is trying to achieve. They want to see demoralized, frightened people who will only be happy to receive them. Yeah, don't hold your breath.

When we last spoke with Dmitry this morning, he was wandering around his stricken city looking for a pharmacy that was open. As part of his climate policy, President Joe Biden wants half of all cars sold in America in 2030 to be electric, and to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

There's a vision of the future that is now beginning to happen, a future of the automobile industry that is electric. There's no turning back. The question is whether we'll lead or fall behind in the race for the future.

To lead in the clean energy technology battle, America is going to need lots of lithium, cobalt, copper, and other minerals. Rich veins of them have been found in America's western states. Setting the stage for a conflict over whether those resources should even be dug up.

Lithium Americas is a Canadian company, and they have plans to build what would be America's biggest lithium mine at Thacker Pass, which is kind of near the border of Nevada and Oregon, in the middle of this caldera that was formed by a supervolcano about 16 million years ago.

Erin Braun is our Mountain West correspondent.

But this mine proposal is super controversial among all kinds of local groups in Nevada. And so it's gotten a lot of attention from all manner of people, from environmentalists to tribal nations.

So tell me who's in opposition here. What are they arguing?

There are ranchers and farmers from a nearby town of Orovada. And this is a very small town. It's just about 120 people. And they are worried that the mine will threaten their water supply and their air quality. There are a couple of different Native American tribes that allege that a massacre of their ancestors took place near the site of the mine in 1865, and they worry that digging up the site would be desecrating this sacred place and erasing their history. And then you've got some environmental groups that are worried about protecting migration corridors for local wildlife. So it's kind of got all these different threads that are making it a very controversial project, but it is also a kind of useful example of the way in which fights over new mining projects are playing out or about to be playing out all around the West.

It seems clear, though, that those worries are at least in some cases well-founded.

When mining got started in the West, Congress passed this General Mining Act of 1872, and they made it really easy for prospectors to start to stake a claim on public lands. To this day, they actually still don't have to pay any royalties on the minerals that they extract from the land, and that has proven really controversial. And there was very little oversight of these mining projects. And so recently, the Government Accountability Office estimated that as a result of all this mining that had happened, there are about 530,000 abandoned hard rock mine features on public lands, and that could be something like an abandoned tunnel or a waste pile. And about 90,000 of those features could pose a safety or environmental hazard. Things are really different today. Mining companies have to complete environmental impact reports and study how their activities would affect the region, but it's still something that people have reason to be wary of given the history.

So as you say, times have changed and this can all be done with an eye towards environmentalism, but still mining scars the landscape. This is a region of the country you've told us before is aiming to turn itself into tourist destinations in a lot of cases.

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting thing to consider when we think about the economic future of the West. In the past, it has been so dependent on extractive activities to keep local economies running, but in the past, few decades, we've seen this shift happening where western towns are marketing their mountains and their canyons and their dark night skies. And so there's this question about whether a shift back to mining threatens this economic diversity that a place has found. And a thought experiment that I have been thinking about is Moab, Utah. It's really renowned for hiking and mountain biking. But this part of Utah is also home to huge deposits of uranium. And historically, that is what the local economy had been dependent on. And so when you think about nuclear energy, for example, and whether or not the Department of Energy succeeds in reviving that, if there's a chance that uranium mining could come back to this area that now is renowned for tourism, I think that it would be really controversial and hugely unpopular with the 3 million or so tourists that come to the area each year.

So there is a lot of resistance here and a lot of good reason for it, I suppose. Why is it that the Biden administration is so bent on getting all of these mining operations off the ground?

There are a couple of reasons why the Biden administration is pretty intent on beefing up domestic supply of critical minerals. First is because China has become a juggernaut for rare earth processing. And so the Biden administration is wary of this kind of dependence on foreign powers, especially ones who it does not have the best relationship with. And then second, we've seen the COVID-19 pandemic expose the pinch points in global supply networks, and that really further worried politicians and firms. With all of this swirling, we've kind of seen how the green transition has turned the pursuit of critical minerals like lithium into a great power competition, sort of like the search for oil that we saw a few decades ago.

So there are a couple of extra factors there, but really this is about the energy transition. And I assume that these same kinds of calculations are going on elsewhere in the world too.

We are, yeah. We're seeing a bit of a scramble for the kinds of critical minerals that are needed in green energy technologies. The International Energy Agency, which is a forecaster, estimates that by 2040, demand for lithium could increase by more than 40 times relative to 2020 levels. And in that same time period, demand for cobalt and nickel could grow by about 20 times. Some environmentalists I spoke with suggested that we should be viewing these projections a bit skeptically as the technology continues to develop. In 10 to 15 years, is lithium still going to be the mineral of choice for batteries, for example. But there are two reasons why it looks like lithium is still going to be the thing to beat for a while. And that is first, because it takes about a decade to develop and scale new technologies. And second is because the Biden administration has set these very ambitious targets for climate policy.

But as you say, times have changed. It must be possible to secure the supplies of these very necessary minerals without running into all the same problems that past mining booms have caused.

I think total harmony is pretty unlikely just given the history of land use in the West, but there are some glimmers of hope. The hydropower industry worked with conservationists to make an agreement for where they would keep some dams and remove others that were harming the environment, and that's kind of a good template to go off of. The administration has also said that they would like to forge better relationships with Native American tribes. And so I think that if they succeed in doing that, we will see a smoother mining process going forward.

Erin, thanks very much for your time.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

My colleague John Fassmann is the author of The Economist's newest column. All about food. You may well have heard from Jon before on The Intelligence and on Checks and Balances, our show on American politics, where he's weirdly good at the weekly quiz. Usually.

I'm kicking myself on the Mississippi River question because obviously Ronald Reagan did not run in 1988, and I knew he didn't win Minnesota in '84. Anyway, that's the last bit of self-criticism I'm gonna do right now.

Jon is also a hardcore foodie. Actually, he hates that word. He's a food fanatic. One of his first columns was about the dreary similarity of restaurants all over the world. Drab pan-Asian and pan-European places that basically all look the same. To prove the point, and in what I can tell you is a very rare chance for me to go out for a nice lunch, he took me to a spot that's the opposite. A place with a strong sense of self. We were also looking for a good place to share some news with you. Some big news about the intelligence. So, John, where are we?

Tell me about the space here.

We are at the St. John, which is in Farringdon, London. It is one of my favorite restaurants in the world. It's a stark white space. Before this was a restaurant, it was It's a smokehouse, and it still has something of the sort of industrial functional appeal to it. It has looked exactly the same since it opened in 1994, and it's been serving the same sort of food since then.

What kind of food?

What must I have while we're here?

I think you must have the roast bone marrow salad. As for what kind of food, it's what Fergus Henderson, who opened this restaurant, calls a kind of British cooking. It's almost like a cold-weather version of rustic Italian cooking, right? Where you have beautiful ingredients, very simply prepared, as little done to them as possible to let them shine through. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

And nose to tail, it seems.

And nose to tail, right. So I'm looking at the menu as we're talking, and I see a cheek, I see a heart, I see some kidneys, I see some dripping toast. That is old school. Britons denigrate their food reflexively, and it's ridiculous. This country has some of the best food in the world, and this restaurant showcases it really well. I can tell you about some specials. Oh great.

Oh please.

We have Bath Chaps served with chicory and mustard, the boned, brined pig's face that's been cured.

I, I want that.

You had him at face.

Yeah.

Can I have a bite of your face?

Of course.

The bone marrow is a must. I have it on recommendation. I would definitely like the bone marrow to start.

Excellent, thank you.

When did you first come here?

I first came here the first time I lived in London, and I now make a point of coming here every time I come through London at least once.

Thank you very much.

Oh, look at it!

Look at that.

Okay, so the storied bone marrow plate is a large piece piece of, I presume, sourdough toast, um, 3 bits of bone bursting with marrow. I believe I've got all of that out of there.

It's coming.

I have used my very elegant-looking implement to essentially poke into the bone along its axis and poke the marrow out onto my toast.

And there you have some serious deliciousness.

All right, I'm going in.

It's so good.

It's so good.

It's so decadent.

Yeah.

And so it's exactly now as it was when you first came here.

I noticed no changes.

Yeah, the ethos hasn't changed.

The ethos hasn't changed. When you're on the road a lot, as journalists often are, there's a sort of dreary predictability that you encounter in, in dining, especially in big city dining, where you can look into a restaurant and you sort of have an idea of what's going to be on the menu. This place is its own thing. The food you get here is not the food that you get anywhere else.

You said you come here every time you're in London.

Every time I'm in London.

What— why don't you tell the listeners why you're in London this time?

Well, Jason, I've been following you around for 2 weeks. It's just been a pleasure because you're a pleasure to hang out with. And it's also been a learning experience for my new job, which is to co-host The Intelligence with you. The Intelligence is going international. You'll be here in London. I'll be at my home studio in New York.

It's going to be an honor to work with you. I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

I think it's going to be a lot of fun too, especially if you keep bringing me here for lunch.

I guess I should say thanks very much for joining me, John.

Anytime, Jason. Better get used to it.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch by email: podcasts@economist.com. And you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes. John and I will see you back here tomorrow.