A world-changing war: four years in Ukraine

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The economist. 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. Today, on a grim anniversary, we look back on how war in one country has changed the world far beyond its borders. Four years ago today, all across Ukraine, people woke up to this. In short order, millions of Ukrainians had fled the biggest displacement of people in Europe since the Second World War. Those who stayed and those who have since returned are now facing the harshest winter since the war began, often and unpredictably, without water or power or heat. Many Ukrainians, of course, have made new lives elsewhere. Irina Kushnir fled to Istanbul in 2022 and says she always planned to return to her eastern home in Kharkiv. Four years later, she says life has turned out differently. Her daughter stayed in Ukraine. She says she's proud of that, that it's important that young people stay because they are the future. The war has done far more than tear apart Ukrainian families. It's ripped at the global Security order as American aid in particular has proved so fickle. War on Europe's doorstep has the EU working to secure its own defense like never before. And it's changed what that security looks like. Less tanks and jets, more drones and hybrid warfare. To talk through all of this, I'm joined in London by Edward Carr, our

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deputy editor, and Shashank Joshi, our defence editor.

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And.

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And Oliver Carol, our Ukraine correspondent who's in Kyiv. Thanks all of you for joining us today.

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Nice to be here.

3:43

Thanks, Jason.

3:44

It's great to be here.

3:45

Now, Oliver, let's start with you on this fourth anniversary of the start of the war. You've been reporting from Ukraine since that very first day. I remember that day. What's it been like, in short, to witness the war unfold?

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I arrived in Kyiv a little over a week before the invasion. And at that point I was still pretty unsure whether this would be a two week assignment. But it turned out to be something quite different. By the 23rd, there were no doubts. I had a tip off that it would be the next morning. And so I got up in the morning at 4am and then, sure enough, the missiles started falling. It was a really surreal and really quite sad first month seeing university lecturers preparing Molotov cocktails. I was one of the first journalists in to Bucha to see all the atrocities there. And we've seen everything since, the offensives, the counteroffensives, the war of attrition. And now we're down to this really uneasy quagmire, seeing Ukraine hold the front lines heroically, but get progressively weaker in the rear. So, yeah, I mean, it's been heavy, I suppose you'd say, but also a massive privilege to see and witness and document it.

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For the Economist and Edward Shashank, you've been involved deeply in the coverage that we have had of this war from London, kind of in that four year sweep. How do you think your view on the war has changed over that time? Edward, let's start with you.

4:52

Well, I remember getting the phone call. What time was it, Shashank? I mean, very early in the morning. It was dawn. Yeah, it was a Thursday morning. And the first few months it was very intense. We were covering this war around the clock. Meanwhile, the stakes to me seem just as high as they were. The stakes for Europe, the stakes obviously for Ukraine itself, but also the stakes for Russia and the consequences for Russia of what is, in my mind a disastrous war for it and for Putin.

5:09

Shashank, I recall early discussions with you about whether or not the Guesses of this being three days and over with were going to prove true or not.

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I remember that. I also remember being woken up by Ed saying, it's happened, it's happening. And I remember ripping up what we'd written for that week and starting again. I was among those who underestimated the Ukrainians and didn't think they would be enduring to this degree. I thought Russian mass would eventually overpower them, and I was very, very wrong on that. But I reflect on the last several years and I think of the shockwaves this war has sent in so many directions. Stuff that is now almost at the back of our heads. The remarkable mutiny of Evgeny Prigozhin, the march on Moscow, North Korean troops fighting in Europe on a substantial scale to evict Ukraine from Kursk Province. And of course, for me, it's a sort of observer of nuclear strategy worldwide. That really dangerous moment in late 2022 when there was a real chance that Russia might use nuclear weapons if Ukraine were to break through at Kherson and cause massive damage to Russian forces. And it's, I think, a sign of how momentous this war has been, that each of those things, in some ways historical in itself, has been cast into some kind of subplot for the war as a whole.

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The other thing, I think this war has been the stage on which the increasingly troubled transatlantic relationship has played out. America's support for Ukraine, the terms of that support, the feeling that Europe was or wasn't doing enough, then followed by Trump's skepticism about the war. All of that has been the backdrop for something we're still trying to comprehend. Now, it's still unclear exactly where that's going, but I think the relationship between the United States and Europe has changed fundamentally, and Ukraine has been the catalyst of that.

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And, Oliver, we've spoken over the past four years about how the war has played out, how things have looked on the ground. Taking all of that in, how do you think the war has changed Ukraine's people?

7:37

Well, I've been traveling to Ukraine since 1997, so I know the country. It was a tender, tolerant, relatively peaceful country. If you take aside what was happening in the east and what Russia did to it, with all the things we've talked about and the consequences of that have changed the nation and make some of the decisions that it now has to take about its future so much more difficult. Ukraine itself is physically smaller. The population is about a quarter smaller than it was at the start of the war. And there's been a shift in opinions 98% now have a very negative view of Russia shift towards European values. But you're also seeing a fragmentation. The pure unity of that first year of war is definitely fractured and societies now split into different camps. Those who stayed, those who left, those who fought, those who didn't. And these divisions, I think, will be heavily played upon the minute the war ends. If it does, I think the day after promises to be just as dramatic and difficult as the war itself.

7:47

And Edward, what's your view on what things are like in Ukraine in the political sphere?

8:47

Right at the beginning of the war, one of the things that happened was that this country that had been very chaotically and corruptly governed cohered. It was an astonishing thing. It was a sort of self organizing principle that Ukrainians found within themselves the ability to resist a much larger country and surprised the world when it did it. And as the war has continued, perhaps understandably, kind of normal politics has reasserted itself. And so Zelenskyy's incredible popularity has been eroded. There have been instances of corruption, in particular, a very big instance with the arrest of one official recently and another official fleeing the country. All of that is kind of what you'd expect, I think. It hasn't stopped Ukraine being able to fight. It hasn't stopped there being a resistance to Russia. But there's fatigue. And this war has been going on a very, very long time now.

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Shashank, a question for you, because you've been following the defense end of things, and in a sense, we've seen the nature of modern warfare change just in the course of this one conflict we have.

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Just before the war began, I wrote a technology quarterly which was on the subject of hiding versus finding on the battlefield. And the argument was essentially the technologies of sensors. So drones, satellite, things like that, combined with cheap precision strike weapons were tilting the battlefield from the people trying to hide on the ground and towards the finders. And you had a more lethal battlefield. What we've seen in Ukraine is the extreme validation of that concept. We have moved much more in the direction of what you would call a transparent battlefield, one in which everything is seen from above, one in which it is very, very dangerous to be moving or exposed on the ground. And the result is effectively a static, sluggish battlefield in which neither Ukraine nor Russia can concentrate large numbers of forces because they will be seen and destroyed from the air. They have to rely on very small dismounted infantry formations sneaking over the terrain. In addition to that, we've seen dramatically expanded use of small, cheap strike drones. We have seen the return of very old fashioned ways of fighting, such as wire guided missiles that would be familiar to a Egyptian infantryman from the 1970s fighting against Israel. We've also, I think, in a very big way seen the central role played by commercial actors in warfare. And I think the most obvious example of this is the provision of satellite communications by Starlink both to Ukraine and more recently some degree to Russia. And the role of these commercial entities who are not necessarily beholden to states who have their own interests. I think that's been a real wake up call for Western militaries as well, who have realized this is the way that we might also have to fight.

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The thing that strikes me about the way that the war's been fought is the somewhat different stakes here. This is a war of attrition and that clearly favors Russia, but it's also a war where Ukraine is fighting its survival and Russia is fighting a war of choice. And so I think that somewhat offsets the question of mass and resources. And it isn't the first time that a big army has struggled against a much smaller army. And I think it's worth remembering that

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there's this unspoken assumption that Ukraine will continue as Europe's fortress. Certainly Ukrainians feel this, a lot of them do, at least that they're fighting on to buy Europe, for example, time to prepare. And I think there's a danger that unless serious thought is given how to strengthen Ukraine, that means not just using the billions which are being earmarked for Ukraine to strengthen Europe's own industrial base, we're only actually buying time for Russia. Ukrainian resilience isn't inexhaustible. I was speaking to a soldier just the other day and he's been fighting since 2014 and he reckoned a third of his address book was no longer phone able and he couldn't bring himself to delete the names. He said.

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But what strikes me, Oli, is that Ukraine started this war in a weaker position. In a much weaker position. In fact, the calculation of Putin's generals was that they would be able to overrun the country. And then this period of mobile warfare ended after a few months. And since then it's been very static. And we've seen up front, you've seen, in fact reported brilliantly up front on how much strain Ukraine has been under. And through your reports we've got a very keen sense of how much suffering and effort's been required. Get the similar reports from the Russian front lines because journalists aren't allowed there. Very occasionally we get to read accounts of the slaughter and misery on the Russian front lines from conscripts who are deserting in record numbers, undertrained. The price for recruiting them is going up. And still Russia fails to take towns and advances. A recent report from CSS said only up to 70 meters a day in the Donetsk front, which is slower than the Battle of the Somme. So I don't want to minimize, minimize in any sense the suffering on the Ukraine side and the exhaustion in Ukraine. But I am struck by the repeated failure of Russia to be able to stage large advances. And I guess the question for this coming year of war is whether Russia's ability to mobilize manpower and machinery is likely to increase, stay the same or even decrease.

13:10

A question maybe for all of you on how this has shuffled alliances. The notion of rearmament, who backs whom, who can count on whom? And how that's changed over the course of the war. What's the sort of high level view from your standpoint, Shashank?

14:45

The rearmament is real. It's very, very real. And to give you a sense of that, even since the beginning of the full scale invasion, European defence spending has gone up by 50%. That's an absolutely enormous sum of money and it's resulted in massive changes. Equipment procurement has gone up 40% year year in Europe. Defense R and D has gone through the roof. Ammunition production has multiplied sixfold since the pre war level in Europe. If you look at shells. So this is incredibly real rearmament. But on the other side, what we also have seen, and this is very important, is a Russian, North Korean, Iranian, Chinese defense industrial complex. To the point where without regular supplies of Chinese components of North Korean ammunition, of Iranian drone designs earlier in the conflict, Russia would not have been able to maintain itself in this conflict. And indeed, even if today China were to shut the supplies off of all vital components, the Russian defense industry would grind to a halt. So one really significant outcome of the last several years of conflict has I think been this deep coupling of this Sino Russian defense industry in a way that will have consequences for years to come.

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Let's be completely honest. Are you happy with your job? The fact is a huge number of people can't say yes to that. Too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown or one we never really wanted in the first place. But we stick it out and we give reasons like what if the next move is worse? And I've put years into this place and maybe the most common one, isn't everyone miserable at work? But There's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving. It's time to get unstuck. It's time for Strawberry me. They match you with a certified career coach who helps you get from where you are to where you want to be, either at your existing job or by helping you find a new one. Your coach helps clarify your goals, creates a plan and keeps you accountable along the way. Go to Strawberry Me Career and get 50% off your first coaching session. That's Strawberry Me.

16:16

Oliver mentioned earlier the notion that we've spoken about several times on the show the day after the plan for what comes after. What at this point is your view? What risks are there for the day after?

17:12

One of the things that really worries me about the day after is that I don't see the European Union coming good on its promise to admit Ukraine. And I also think given the fiscal pressure of most of Europe, that the chances of Europe being insufficiently generous to Ukraine when the fighting stops are pretty high. So the scene is set for some kind of betrayal narrative in Ukraine. Ukraine having fought the war partly for Europe's behalf and then Europe not really coming to help afterwards. And that's potentially very, very dangerous.

17:24

I think much more attention has gone to how does Ukraine secure itself, you know, stand on its own two feet in a post war scenario. And what we have seen in recent years is Ukraine power ahead on developing long range drones, long range cruise missiles of a kind that many NATO countries simply don't possess themselves. And these are not hypothetical weapons. These are weapons that are already striking deep inside Russia, inflicting damage on Russian oil refineries, energy supplies, causing real disruption. And I think if we think about Ukraine as a post war state standing up for its own security, the Ukrainian missile force with ever longer reach into Russia with ever more accurate missiles is going to be one absolutely pivotal element of that deterrent effort that Ukraine will need to stabilize a long term peace with Russia.

17:57

About the nature of that peace, I'd like to ask on this anniversary, do you see an end to this? Will we be sitting here talking about another anniversary or one four years from now?

18:50

Well, I think there are a number of problems about imagining a real peace here. Part of this is for Vladimir Putin, peace is difficult. For him, reallocating resources from his war economy to a peace economy is very difficult and likely to cause a recession. Another thing is that the returning soldiers are not coming back as heroes. And the other thing for Putin, I think, is that the underlying logic of the war he's been able to sort of put aside. Well, I think it has to start facing up to the fact that this war's cost a lot, blood and in treasure and has accomplished very little. But from the point of view of the battlefield, too, it's difficult to see how this works because of two outstanding issues. One is territory. Putin wants to be able to say that he successfully got the territories that he said he had to, and that means being given ground that he couldn't take through force of arms. Why should Ukraine give up this ground? It's vital for the defence of Ukraine and to stop further advances. The other thing is security guarantees. The better the security guarantees, the more plausible they are for Ukraine, the less acceptable they are to Putin. So it's hard to imagine a set of security guarantees that satisfies both parties

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every day that the war is going on in Ukraine. Ukraine is losing a little bit because the war is going on in Ukraine. It's really not going on in Russia so much. And there is an argument that sooner or later, Putin may decide that this is the right time to take the chance to bank some of the things he's being offered from the Americans. But if you speak to those who are on, you might say the pro continuation camp, the people who believe that reforms in Ukraine can actually lead to massive attritional rates. So not at the 30,000 we're talking at the moment, but 50,000 is the target by summer, maybe 70, maybe 100,000amonth, those kind of figures. It's very difficult to continue war, and there are some optimists inside the new Defence Ministry, for example, who thinks that kind of thing is possible if reforms are successful. But again, does Putin understand what's coming down the line? Probably not. This is a man who was told in 2022 there would be very little Ukrainian resistance. I think ultimately we're looking for real pressure to be put on Russia from the Americans. And what we've seen so far is it's not really coming.

20:15

The frustrating thing is, in the Trump administration, we hear the view that Ukraine is losing. Ukraine is fated for defeat, and that's why it must sign a deal, however ropey that deal is. But the US is approaching this as if it is some disinterested, detached observer of the conflict, when in fact it's the pivotal player here. Still, US power is still the central factor in much of this, both in terms of its ability to pressure Russia, but on the flip side, in its ability to give Ukraine the arms, the ammunition, the technology that it needs, whether that is intelligence, whether that is shells, whether that's long range rockets. And if Donald Trump decides to keep that up and keep selling some of this to Europe, Ukraine can stay in this even if things are tough. If he chooses to say, I want a deal before the midterms that I can claim as my own and go towards my Nobel Peace Prize campaign and I'm willing to cut Ukraine off at the knees. We are not out of the woods yet in terms of risk of that scenario. And I worry very much that that could still completely upturn many of the assumptions of our conversation.

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Edward Oliver Shashank, thank you all very much for joining us.

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Thank you, Jason.

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Thank you.

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Thanks, Jason.

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What has remained largely hidden from view over these four years is what's going on inside Russia, a country at war whose citizens increasingly wish it wasn't. Tomorrow we'll be joined by our Russia editor, Arkady Ostrovsky to take a close look at how the conflict manifests in Russians day to day lives. That's all for this episode of THE Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

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Com.

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