Talk in Turkey: Russia-Ukraine peace negotiations

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. In New York, I'm John Fassman and.

In London I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Ukrainian soldiers have made efficient use of anti tank weapons. Russian tanks have begun sporting odd metal cages atop the turrets, intended as protection, but perhaps more accurately described as emotional support armor.

And at this time of year in the Antarctic, it should be time to hunker down for winter. Instead, it's so warm that scientists at a research station are going for a run. We look at a remarkable heat wave and what it means for climate stability the world over.

But first.

Today, delegates from Russia and Ukraine are starting a new round of peace talks in Istanbul. Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who's hosting the talks, said he wants to create an atmosphere of peace for the two sides. Previous negotiations have gone nowhere and what little news has emerged about them has revealed some unusual detail. At talks in Kyiv earlier this month, several Ukrainian negotiators and the pro Kremlin oligarch Roman Abramovich reportedly suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky continues to stress the need for negotiations, But he didn't strike a particularly hopeful note for today's saying simply, let's look at the result. Ukraine has been here before. Back in 2014, Russia signed the Minsk Agreement, promising to withdraw its troops from the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas. It didn't, and the region has to this day not known a lasting peace. So there are doubts about both the substance and the sustainability of any diplomatic solutions.

Peace talks between Russia and Ukraine. They have been going on pretty much continuously for the last three weeks, but mostly in an online video conference format.

Chris Lockwood is the Economist's Europe editor.

This is the first time for two weeks that the negotiators have sat down together and they're doing it in Turkey rather than at the border in Belarus, which is a more neutral location and may be conducive to making progress. There have been some small signs of progress, but honestly, it will still be very tough.

And what do we know about what both sides want at this point? What does Russia what does Vladimir Putin wants?

We see, I think, what he wants from the list of demands that have been rolled out pretty much from the start. They've changed a little bit, but not very much. There are four main areas here. The first one you could call security guarantees for Russia. That means that Ukraine must guarantee not to join NATO, must make a formal declaration of neutrality, can't join the eu. I think that's particularly difficult. Russia next wants relief from Western sanctions. Then they want the demilitarisation of Ukraine, and finally what I would call territorial agreements. That is a Ukrainian and indeed international acceptance that Crimea is formally part of Russia. It's obviously been annexed by Russia since 2014, and also that the Donbas region in the east of the country should be seen not as Russian, but as independent state.

And so as for those demands, are there points on which Ukraine is willing to meet Russia in the middle?

Well, perhaps certainly on one or two of them. The most obvious one where progress can be made is over the question of neutrality. President Zelenskyy over the weekend has made it clear that the idea of not joining NATO can definitely be put on the table. It's clear that Ukraine is not going to be allowed to join NATO anytime soon. NATO can't import a country at war into its organization and has no intention of doing that. So that, in a sense is a fairly easy thing to give away. But even so, in return for that Zelenskyy would want strong security guarantees, which perhaps would be almost as binding as being part of NATO, with the whole Article 5 declaration that an attack on one is an attack on all and everyone has to come to their aid. So it's not clear to me that even that is that easy to naturally bolt down, but it's certainly an area where most progress can be made.

But what about this point of demilitarization?

Well, that's going to be very tricky, because by demilitarization, the Russians seem to be insisting on a huge cut to the size of the Ukrainian armed forces, about 50,000 soldiers, and actually they're saying 100,000, if you include border guards, police and so forth. So these numbers are really tiny in comparison to what Ukraine currently has, that army, which would have to be reduced to a fifth of its size, and that would make it extremely weak and vulnerable. So I think there's very little chance, if Russia holds out for that, that they'll get anywhere near it.

And what about the territorial claim, the one that seems the greatest sticking point?

I think that will be very difficult. One part of it might not be so hard. That is the idea of recognition of Crimea. It's a fact the Russians have Crimea. There are no non Russian speakers left there. They held a referendum, of course, it was a rigged referendum, but if you held it again now, they would surely win it. And the west, indeed everyone else, has sort of come to live, I think, with the Russian occupation of Crimea. So perhaps a deal can be done there. The Donbas region, much harder, because no one knows what exactly the Donbas is anymore. The front lines of it are shifting all the time, and the Russians are clearly envisaging much more of the Donbas than they previously held. And even that would be very difficult for them, the Ukrainians, to formally give away. The only thing I would say there is, if anyone can make concessions and sell them to their people, it's President Zelensky, thanks to his incredible popularity at the moment.

But what would be his demands in a more ideal world? What's on Ukraine's wish list?

Well, Ukraine's wish list is much more simple. I think the first thing is they want the fighting to stop. That's actually quite easy. You can have a ceasefire, but a ceasefire is not the same as a permanent peace. More concretely, after that, what they want is a full withdrawal of Russian troops. Now, that's going to be a lot trickier. The problem really is what happens down in the Donbass, where Russia is trying to construct a land bridge from Russia proper through the Donbas and all the way out to Crimea. That I think will be much harder to arrange and the Russians will be very slow to give way on that, if ever.

And do you think so far that these negotiations are on Russia's part in good faith? Is this a genuine attempt to find a middle ground?

I don't think they are acting in good faith in the sense that they are nowhere near making the kinds of compromises that would bring this war to an end. And I think they are spinning things out to create an illusion that they're trying to find a solution while they are continuing to reinforce their positions, hunker down to a certain extent. What I'm afraid of is that this is a form of window dressing for a new form of frozen conflict, just like we had before the war began, with Russia in effect occupying the eastern part of Donbas and making Ukraine a troubled and unstable place. With a low level war continuing all the time now, it will be the same, only much bigger, with the area that Russia has nibbled away at, much more considerable. I don't think they are anywhere near considering a full withdrawal from Ukraine. So to that extent, the negotiations are sort of dummy negotiations that make sense on paper, but won't actually ever be agreed to by President Putin.

So at every turn here, it sounds as if you are not optimistic for a realistic, for a sustainable outcome from these talks.

Well, I'm not. That doesn't mean that no good can come of them. One thing that we can hope to see, I think, is a ceasefire. Not a solution, but a ceasefire. And of course that is immensely valuable. It means that people are not dying. If it holds, or even if it only partially holds, this would be an enormous improvement on what we have now. I think you could hope for something where the fighting is de escalated, maybe even paused, while endless protracted negotiations go on. Perhaps that's the future. Not a very encouraging one, but equally not quite as bad as what's happening now.

Chris, thanks very much for joining us.

My pleasure.

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One month into Russia's invasion of Ukraine and tales of Ukrainian bravery are legion. But so are tales of the Russian army's incompetence and poor equipment. Soldiers have surrendered and destroyed their own vehicles to avoid fighting. They were sent into battle with ready meals that expired in 2002. As many as 60% of Russia's supposedly precision guided missiles have failed to hit their targets. And now, atop many of their tanks, crude cages have appeared.

A lot of people were puzzled by these structures when they started to appear on Russian tanks in around about January this year.

David Hambling writes about technology for the Economist.

They look like climbing frames, they're sort of cages of metal bars arranged over the tank turret. And there was a lot of speculation about what they were for. Some people said they looked like clothes drying lines.

And what are they exactly? What do they do?

Well, they appear to be a sort of field expedient armour, which is armour protection that gets added onto a tank after it leaves the factory. There's been all sorts of these down the years, typically things like welding extra bits of sheet metal on or attaching sandbags. But there are also some which do resemble this type of armour, known as bar or slat armour. And it can actually be effective, but not when it's placed vertically above the turret.

So it's not unusual for armies to modify tanks once they're in the field, right?

No, it's very common, particularly for things like urban combat where you feel it's worth trading a bit of extra weight and a bit less mobility for increased protection. That's when these add ons do tend to get bolted on when soldiers feel like they might need a little bit more protection.

And David, how are these tank cages supposed to help?

This type of armour is very specifically designed to stop rocket propelled grenade RPG type weapons which were produced by the Russians and their imitators. This weapon is based on what's called a hollow charge. So if you can imagine metal foil around the inside of a funnel made of explosive, when you detonate the explosive, the metal gets blasted into this extremely narrow, extremely high speed jet moving at several kilometres a second that can cut through a foot of solid steel plate extremely easily. And the idea is with bar or slat armour to Disable the warhead before it hits your tank. It gets caught between the bars which damages the warhead, which specifically breaks the connection between the fuse and the detonator. So the thing doesn't go off. Or if it does go off, it doesn't go off properly. And the jet of white hot metal doesn't go through your vehicle. If the incoming RPG happens to hit one of the bars, it doesn't give you that much protection, but something like 50% of the time it will completely stop the incoming round from exploding and save you.

And is that in fact what we are seeing in Ukraine? Is this armor giving Russian tanks 50% protection? Is it effective?

Well, no. For one thing, we know that their tanks are certainly not being saved because we've seen so many of them destroyed. Even in cases where the threat has come right down through the armour, the working principle requires it to have very specific spacing so that it's the right size to stop a rocket propelled grenade and for the incoming threat to be a rocket propelled grenade. Against heavier anti tank weapons like the Javelins provided by the US and the N laws provided by the uk, this type of armour simply isn't effective. It's like trying to stop a raging bull with chicken wire. It's just way too big for it.

So are they having any effect at all?

Well, they might be improving the morale of the Russian troops because it might at least give them the impression that they've got some sort of protection from these top attack weapons, but it seems quite unlikely. One thing about Russian tanks, they're all designed with a very low profile to make them difficult to see. So sticking a cage on top of it just means you can see it from a long distance, which is a bit of a disadvantage. They also add to the weight of the vehicle, which is always an argument against any kind of add on armour. And the other issue is if they're looking at urban combat where they're expecting people to be attacking from above, it limits the ability of the commander to swing his machine gun and fire up at people shooting down at him. So in that sense it's very hard to see that they have any functional use. So the suggestion is they are purely there as a psychological bolster, which is why some people have called them emotional support armour, or COPE cages.

David, if you and I are talking about this on a podcast, Russian military leaders must certainly be aware of the drawbacks of this armour. Why are they still using them?

On the one hand, there is always the argument that every little helps and that anything you can do that might possibly provide some benefit is worth doing. Unlike the armour that was fitted to American vehicles in Iraq, which was made in factories, this really is field expedient armour, which is knocked together in the field by whatever the local troops happen to have available. In one extreme case, we have what seems to be a bed frame welded to the top of a tank turret. It looks ridiculous, but I guess their theory was, you never know, it might do some good. And if their superiors think this is going to increase morale and make them more likely to go forward rather than backwards, then they would encourage it. However, you have to bear in mind that given that this is very much improvised armour that was cobbled together in the few weeks before the invasion, it's a strong sign that they really weren't prepared to deal with what they were facing in Ukraine. It suggests that they weren't expecting to face the kind of resistance they were and they certainly weren't expecting to face the kind of anti tank weapons that have been decimating the Russian forces.

All right, David, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you very much.

The Concordia weather station is one of the most inhospitable places on Earth.

Catherine Brahik is the Economist environment editor.

You have to sort of imagine a very, very high, flat, white desert like plateau of ice. And it's incredibly, incredibly cold. The temperatures barely rise above -25 degrees Celsius even in the summer. And in midwinter they can fall to around minus 85 degrees Celsius. These research stations sit about 3,000 meters above sea level. There are about a dozen or so crew who live and work in this research station, which is a French Italian collaboration. And normally they'd really only leave the station for essential work on the outside at the minute we're heading into the winter, so temperatures should be dropping. But something really weird has just happened where the Concordia Research Station has experienced quite a remarkable heat wave.

And what does a remarkable heat wave mean in this context? What type of temperatures are we talking about?

So it's still cold. On March 18, the temperature reached a phenomenal high of -11.2 degrees Celsius. That's 40 degrees warmer than what it should be at this time of year. So it's, you know, had some fun little consequences for people down there. Like the station's research doctor apparently went for a jog, not something that they would normally be doing. There are other research stations across Antarctica, specifically East Antarctica. There's a Russian research station known as Vostok, and the temperatures there were 15 degrees warmer than the previous all time record across the continent, temperatures have been about four to four and a half degrees higher than usual.

And is this down to climate change?

Researchers are saying that we're seeing more of these events, but whether or not you can attribute this specific event to climate change is quite tricky. What meteorologists say happened is that a gush of warm, damp air blowed towards Antarctica from the region that's sort of southeast of Australia and managed to get all the way into East Antarctica's interior.

So is this part of a broader trend? Has Antarctica generally been warming?

The patterns are quite different whether you're looking at the west of the continent or the east of the continent. So there are parts in the west where temperatures have been rising by, I believe, about three times as fast as the global average. East Antarctica is very different to that. And as a whole, to some extent, the impacts of global warming have been sort of warded off over Antarctica by the large ozone hole above the continent. And so that ozone hole has actually had a regional cooling effect that offsets basically the heating that might have been caused otherwise. It's a very, very different story to what's actually happening at the other end of the planet in the Arctic.

Yeah. So what is happening on the other end of the planet in the Arctic?

So the Arctic is commonly known as the canary in the coal mine for climate change. It is experiencing warming that is four times faster than the global average, and that's across the region as a whole. We've seen a number of heat waves. We're seeing increased fires in the Arctic Circle, we're seeing sea ice dwindling very, very, very quickly. All of this is a bit of a frontline to climate change, in a sense, because these temperatures are warming so much faster there than for the rest of the globe.

Is this an isolated question, just a sort of phenomenon happening at both poles, or should the rest of us be worried about what's happening there?

So I think it's easy to feel like, you know, the poles are very remote for most of us, but actually the stability of the global climate to some extent is linked to having a big differential between a very cold polar region and a warm tropical region. And if you start to destabilize that, if you start to decrease that temperature differential, then you have widespread impacts on the global climate system. Essentially, a more unstable polar climate leads, generally speaking, to more unstable global climate.

All right, Katrine, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you, John.

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