Season 2 Episode 10

Speakers: Jakub Parusinski & Timothy Ash

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Jakub: Hello and welcome back to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World, a podcast from Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent. I'm Jakub Parusinski. Each week we're going to be analysing the undercurrents of the war in Ukraine, bringing you analysis from across the globe to explain its context and consequences as the war continues.

In this, our final episode of our second season, we're taking a look at the big picture, an analysis of the macroeconomic challenges that Ukraine is going to be facing in the years ahead.

War is money in more ways than one. It takes a lot of resources to put troops on the battlefield and build tanks. But the economy is also one of the fronts of the war. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Russia has tried to dismantle and disrupt Ukrainian economic activity, and Ukraine has withstood to a surprising extent.

That happened because it had done a lot of preparatory work. It had a banking system that was robust with a large role of the state that avoided bank runs. And with Western aid, actually a lot of Western aid.

Over the past two years, it has been astounding the level to which major Western economies have come together to support Ukraine. But things are looking a lot grimmer now. The U.S. aid package of over 60 billion is held up in Congress due to internal politics.

And for a long time, a European package of 50 billion euros was held up by Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban. After a long period of negotiations and finally some death manoeuvring, the EU is moving forward with its aid package.

In the words of Donald Tusk, “Europe doesn't have a Ukraine fatigue problem, it has an Orban fatigue problem.”

But Ukraine is in a very difficult spot right now. It's essentially living paycheck to paycheck with billion-dollar gaps to be filled every month from different sources. And looking forward, well, that's not going to get a lot better. We already have the prospect of a long war ahead of us, and after that, there's reconstruction.

So, where can we find the funds for that? One of the solutions, seized or immobilised Russian assets, there are hundreds of billions of Russian assets in Western financial systems that could be used to rebuild Ukraine.

Then there's also the question of internal politics in Ukraine. Over the past weeks, there’s been an increasingly visible feud between commander in chief Valeri Zaluszny, and President Vlodimir Zelensky. 

On February 8th, Zaluzhsny was dismissed in his role, replaced by General Oleksandr Syrskyi, who previously served as the commander of Ukraine's Ground Forces.

You can read what you want into the smiling photo of Zelensky and his outgoing commander in chief, but the reality is that Zaluszny is one of the most trusted figures in Ukraine and a potential presidential frontrunner. Zelensky, on the other hand, is under more and more pressure. We’re likely to see the fallout from this play out further in the months and years to come. 

But the story is actually much bigger than this. Ukraine needs a reset, both for domestic and international reasons. After two years of full-scale invasion, people are tired, and they need some kind of vision of how to move forward.

A report published by KI Insights on February two looked at the need and what a potential government reshuffle could look like. And it was confirmed a few days later by Zelenskyy himself that he was thinking very much about a reset, but that also has implications for the economy and for Ukraine's financial stability.

To get into all of this, I spoke to Timothy Ash. Timothy has been an economist for 30 years, working for some of the most prestigious banking institutions in the world over that time. His focus has been on the economics of emerging Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, particularly Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey.

You can find his writing on Chatham House, CEPA and his excellent Substack at tashecon blog. We started off by talking about how it is that Ukraine has sustained its economy so effectively over the past two years of war.

Jakub: Hi, Timothy. Thank you for joining us on Power Lines.

Timothy: My pleasure. Good to be here.

Jakub: So, maybe to start, we're just shy of two years into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Obviously two incredibly difficult years for the country, and I wanted to start with looking at the economy.

And so, basically the question is, how is it that Ukraine has managed to hold up so well? When we see sort of photos and videos of what's happening in Kyiv and major cities life keep going on, we've actually had 2023 results for a lot of companies that look relatively positive.

In some cases, they've actually even achieved some of their best results for quite a while now. How is that possible?

Timothy: Well, you’re right, absolutely remarkable in terms of the durability and resilience of the Ukrainian economy. Latest figures suggest that maybe the economy grew over 5% last year, which is pretty astounding in a war scenario.

And the fact that banks have worked, money has worked, the economy is continuing to function, infrastructure, the railways work better than in the UK, which is pretty extraordinary. Maybe not that surprising from a UK perspective, but basic infrastructure works, and that's extraordinary given the scale of the attacks from Russia.

If I think about the economy, I think it's a reflection of a few things. Firstly, the remarkable resilience and innovation of Ukrainians. I mean, we've seen that in the conduct of the war, the use of technology, but I think in general the countries come together, it's about survival. There's no option but to kind of carry on. And that's provided a lot of that durability. The coming together.

Secondly, the fact that the banking system works, currencies work, all those kind of things. I think that's partially a reflection of the reforms that were instigated after Euromaidan in 2015. I mean, one of the things I've highlighted, I've written over the recent years is that actually they did sort the banking sector out.

They reduced the number of banks, closed a lot of banks that were money laundering or corrupt institutions. It became a lot more resilient. Central bank itself was massively reformed.

It's a proper central bank. It's respected, it's trusted, it ran inflation targeting certainly before the full-scale invasion. It's a credible institution, which runs proper policy. I mean, the policy responses too, in response to the full-scale invasion were very, very orthodox, and credible.

And then finally, in the end the full-scale invasion had an enormous cost on the economy, no doubt about it. I mean, in ‘22, probably real GDP declined by about a third. That was a really significant hit, obviously.

Budget revenues suffered big drawdown; budget deficit increased to something like 20% of GDP export revenues. Obviously, a lot of big exporting entities, enterprises were forced out of production, weren't able to export. So, there's a big hit, obviously, to the trade position and the current account position.

But really critical has been the provision of Western financial support, not just military support, but the budget and balance of payment support's been running around 40 billion a year now for the past two years.

And that's filled budget financing gaps. It's helped support the balance of payments. It's helped the central bank build reserves to just around $40 billion, which is close to record highs.

That's provided stability for the exchange rate. That's really important in terms of inflation. But also, on the fiscal side, the fact that they haven't had to resort to monetary financing of a deficit. Obviously, they've not been printing money, but they've been able to soldiers wages, pensions, public sector salaries, all those kind of things.

That's certainly helped avoid a devaluation hyperinflation spiral. It's meant that the government has functioned and worked, and the economy generally has worked. 

So, it's a combination of those three, I would argue, reforms instigated since 2015, the innovation shown by Ukrainians and bravery, but also the Western financial support that has been forthcoming, certainly in the last two years.

Jakub: Thank you. I think that's a fantastic overview, and it's really astounding to see sort of the transformation that Ukrainian banking has gone through.

But I think it's also really interesting what you mentioned about the backend of sort of the banking system that's gone through a major cleanup. Back in the day, sort of before Euromaidan, there was a lot of non-performing loans, a lot of corruption, a lot of related party sort of transfers of wealth.

Now, that's all been relatively cleaned up. Looking forward a bit, because in one sense, Ukraine has gone through these two years, very battered, very bruised, but continuing to function as a state, as an economy. And obviously one of the things that is in the back of a lot of people's minds is how do you rebuild the country?

Looking forward, what do you see as the sort of major challenges? And I'm thinking about things like, for example, the demographics. A lot of the labour force has left. How do you kind of manage around that?

There's actually quite a bit of buildup of depth that continues to be issued. And as far as I know, it's coming in at a relatively high interest rate, all things considered. So, how do you see that journey going forward?

Timothy: Well, lots of issues there. On the one part, I am relatively optimistic in terms of once the war ends, I think Ukraine is going to be a really exciting recovery and reconstruction story.

The base is very low, as I mentioned, real GDP, around 30% was lost. There will be a big reconstruction spend. A lot of Western finance official money is going to come into the country. There's mention of use of frozen Russian assets as well.

And others, the innovation that I mentioned earlier, in terms of allowing the economy to endure during the invasion, that innovation, I think will be applied to the recovery and reconstruction.

I've referred to it as the state of Israel kind of moment for Ukraine, maybe not state of Israel as reflect to the Gaza conflict at the moment. But the fact that you have a country that has no other option, but to innovate to survive and develop to survive.

And that for me provides a really positive recovery story. Also, one reason why Ukraine hasn't developed in the last 30 odd years was the lack of an EU accession perspective. Unlike countries like Poland, Czech Republic, all those kind of countries.

I think we now actually have that. I mean, I think there is firm commitment from the EU to pull Ukraine along the EU accession path. Obviously, there's no date, but I think for international business, that's really, really important.

The fact that the West or Europe is committed to bring Ukraine in, it will act as a blueprint for reform. A lot of the problems around corruption, rule of law, all those kind of things that were big problems in the run up to the invasion, they will begin to be ticked off and addressed in that accession process. So, that's kind of really positively encouraging.

Issues for me are, as you mentioned, the return of the population. They need security, they need basic public services, hospitals, schools, roads, all those kind of things need to work. It's going to be a challenge.

But the other issues I would say are financing it and then the institutional framework around recovery and reconstruction. I am not too sure that — I mean, you're probably going to ask me questions further on, but in terms of the state of Western financing, I mean, what we know is the losses incurred by Ukraine in terms of the economy.

Obviously, there was the World Bank report some months back. I think it estimated $411 billion worth of losses by Ukraine. That's building, we could imagine total cost to Ukraine of between 500 billion and trillion dollars when the war eventually ends.

The reconstruction spend, obviously it's a relatively small economy, $200 billion in the run up to the invasion. This question marks about absorption capacity. How much of reconstruction money can Ukrainian solve?

But the way to think of it in my mind is the cost of supporting Ukraine during the war has been about a hundred billion dollars a year. About $40 billion of budget support and about $60 billion of military support from Western countries.

I would think in peacetime, when you think about the recovery, it's going to be something of the order of 50 billion a year, I would think of the need for reconstruction and continuing budget and financial support.

They're big numbers. And I think, I'm a little bit unsure still about how those kind of longer-term commitments are going to be put together.

Jakub: So basically, if I'm sort of to rephrase it slightly, so the reconstruction would probably look like a decade of 50 billion level sort of investments in rebuilding the country, developing new businesses, new industrial capacity, et cetera.

So, it's sort of like, it's not that all of that money is going to come in at one moment, but rather we're talking about a certain period of time during which the country is essentially rebuilt piece by piece.

Timothy: Look, it's finger in the air stuff, no one really knows. My finger is as good as anyone else's. I would think that's the size that I think … obviously 50 billion a year, the economy will be growing over that period. It's a large chunk of GDP in the early years, as later years as you see real appreciation, probably strong levels of real GDP growth.

It will decline as a share of GDP. But I think that's the order that we should be thinking of in terms of this particular project. And as I've written and argued, I think Ukraine's successful recovery and reconstruction should be the number one strategic priority of the West.

I covered the region for a long time. I started off as a Soviet studies person, then I moved into transition economics. So, I followed the development of emerging European economies in that move from plant to market in the early 90s, and then the EU accession drive.

I think this project is as important as the transition from plant to market that the West helped to finance in the period ‘89, ’91. It's really important. Its economy is put back on its feet, so it's able to fund its own defence, which is a frontline for the West. And it needs to be taken seriously.

So, we need to get this right. It's a big investment from the West. It's obviously a big investment also from Ukrainians. And we need to be really crystal clear in, again, the institutional framework around it, how we fund it, what are the priorities, what the Ukrainian economy should look like going forward.

I mean, obviously the traditional industries that dominated before the invasion, all of those are no longer there. I mean, a lot of industrial capacity, old industrial capacity has been destroyed. It's a blank piece of paper in many respects. And it's an opportunity, I think, to rebuild Ukraine's economic profile.

Jakub: That's also quite an interesting question. So, you mentioned that there's one version of this, which is essentially when the war ends, I think there's also probably several shades of grey in between that, where we have essentially a ceasefire or people are talking about a Korea scenario where there's a chunk of Ukrainian territory that continues to be occupied by Russia.

But essentially the sort of the front lines are more or less frozen. And there's a buildup of Ukrainian military capacity, but also a reconstruction that is sort of anchored along a Israel/Korea model, which might not be the thing that a lot of people are hoping for, but it's actually not that bad if you think about it.

Both countries have managed to build, not looking at the past, sort of several months in Israel. They've managed to build quite successful economies, societies, countries, in both cases. So, is that something that is also being considered from an investor perspective?

Timothy: Look, I mean as unfortunately Ukrainians know, I mean, the invasion didn't start in February ’22. I mean, obviously Russia's interference in Ukraine, you could argue goes back decades.

But actually, think about the annexation of Crimea, then the intervention in Donbas in 2014, 2015. And you had Minsk I, Minsk II, and the Ukrainian economy continued to function, investment happened.

If you think from a fiscal perspective, Ukraine restructured debts in 2015, and from a starting point in 90% debt, GDP went down to 50%. Foreign investors bought euro, Ukrainian Euro bonds in that period, post Minsk I, Minsk II before the invasion.

They were willing to invest in the Ukrainian sovereign story, they were willing to invest in corporates and banks. There was relative security across much of Ukrainian.

I think, if we are imagining a scenario like a North/South Korea scenario, or in Israel, still the vast majority of Ukrainian territory will be in the hands of the Ukrainian government.

I mean, Ukraine as is at the moment, I forget the numbers, but let's say something like 15, 17% of Ukrainian territory is occupied, but the vast bulk of the country is still in Ukrainian government hands and is relatively safe.

And I think there will be lots of investment opportunities and I think people will come in as long as there's relative security, there is strong Western financial and military backing to help its security. And there is this EU accession perspective and also a reform perspective.

I mean, I think what's clear is Ukrainians have shown great bravery in fighting in their defence. And our defence, when the war ends or reduces an intensity, they'll want a different Ukraine.

They'll want a Ukraine that's not dominated by oligarchs, where the rule of law works, where European values are in effect, and Ukraine's be a better place to live. So, I think there will be a drive for reform that's certainly going to help inward investment into the country.

Jakub: So, we've danced around the sort of the elephant in the room, I think for a while now, which is sort of where the money's going to come from.

So, I remember a year ago, half a year ago at the London Recovery Conference, there was a lot of talk every time you talked about Ukrainian recovery, people like Andrew Forrest who sort of launched this idea of a Marshall plan for Ukraine and I think committed half a billion of his own funds to sort of set it up.

Organisations like BlackRock, Goldman Sachs were mentioned. Now that doesn't seem like it will be the first line of capital that moves in. So, there's a question of how do you find funds to essentially start kick-off? Where does sort of the first 50 billion come from? Or where does a portion of that at least comes from?

One of the options of course that is being discussed is seizing Russian assets or paying interest off of these to Ukraine. Is that sort of where the first sort of block of capital is going to come from in your view?

Timothy: Yeah, I mean, I was very critical of the London Recovery conferences and the Lugano conferences. There was a lot of focus on the private sector. The private sector will do the heavy lifting and I think that was a bit disingenuous, dishonest from Western governments.

I mean, I'm in the private sector. I work for a big asset manager. The private sector will not in the early years provide that level of financing because there is the long track record of difficulties of private investments, foreign private investment into Ukraine, in the run up to the invasion, rule of law, governance, all those kind of issues.

And they will be slow to change and slow to rebuild foreign investors' confidence. Despite the fact that I've said that this is a huge opportunity. I think private investors will be pretty cautious.

And also, there's obviously their security concerns as well. There will be some private investment. It will be cautious, think more like single digits in terms of billion dollars a year, but nowhere near 50 billion.

And I think the reality is that Ukraine's defence, the defence and its victory in war, and then successful recovery, I mean, we should think of it as a Western public good.

This is in the West's interest to make sure that Putin's aggression fails. Putin is defeated in Ukraine. Ukraine wins the war and becomes a buffer or a — though it's certainly the front line against future Russian aggression.

So, it should have a strong economy, a strong military able to defend itself and help us. So, that costs money. I mean, that's the reality. And we need to invest in that.

Now, obviously this week we've had some good news in terms of Viktor Orban’s efforts to block the 50 billion euros of EU financing for Ukraine. That's 50 billion euros of support committed for the period ‘24 to ‘27. So, over a four-year period that's now been signed off, that's encouraging.

But unfortunately, the 61 billion U.S. support package is stuck in U.S. Congress, and it doesn't look likely that that is going to be approved at this point in time anyway.

The harsh reality, I think is the politics of the world at the moment is as the global cost of living crisis, it's very hard for Western governments to sell the story to their own electorates, to those taxpayers that we need to be paying 50 billion a year, well, actually a hundred billion dollars a year in war, in 50 billion likely dollars a year in peace to help Ukraine.

I mean, that's just the stark reality. Perhaps we can sell the message better. We need to go out there and we need to tell our taxpayers that this is an investment in our defence. If we don't invest in Ukraine, kleptocracy/autocracy will win. Our whole system of government will be on threat. I think we need to do that anyway.

But at the moment, the real politic in Western democracies is it's very difficult to get taxpayer sign off, for those kind of numbers. And I think the only realistic source of providing that scale of financing for Ukraine is accessing the estimated 300 to $350 billion of Central Bank of Russia reserves that are immobilised in our jurisdictions.

In fact, I think it's political suicide for Western liberal market democracies to actually not use those resources to fund Ukraine's defence and then recovery and reconstruction, but instead think that they can go to taxpayers first and basically take money from Western taxpayers to pay for Ukraine's defence and then recovery reconstruction and not go after frozen Russian assets.

It's almost as though there's a lot of debate on frozen Russian assets. And again, we're probably going to go into that a little bit later in the podcast. But there's a lot of talk about we're undermining property rights, or we're in Western jurisdictions by doing this, and that Russia's property rights are being illegally compromised.

I mean, that is an utterly ridiculous line of arguments in my mind. I mean, Russia has clearly invaded Ukraine. It's violated Ukrainian property rights. And actually, if our governments decide that they're going to write a big check spending Western taxpayers’ money before tapping frozen Russian assets.

I mean, what it actually says is that our governments care more about Russian property rights, care about defending the property rights of the Russian state that's conducted what's invaded Ukraine. It's conducted war crimes and genocide against Ukraine.

And actually, they care more about Russian property rights than the property rights of their own taxpayers. I think it's just extraordinary. But anyway.

Jakub: It’s absolutely ridiculous. Yeah, no, so that part is, I think, quite ridiculous and probably, well at least it feels like that argument is slowly being eaten away by a lot of counter rhetoric, counter examples.

There's another one argument that is also on a moral level is probably quite clear, but legally is a lot more thorny, which is the assets of Western companies in Russia.

And I'd love to hear your opinion to what extent it's valid, but this argument that if you essentially say that the Russian assets are compensation for losses incurred due to the full-scale invasion, well, some of those losses are actually companies that continue to operate in Russia or have had their assets seized or something like that.

So, how can we essentially support Ukrainians without having the money ending up in Danone or Pepsi?

Timothy: Yeah, well look on the frozen Russian asset issue, there's lots of counter arguments. I would turn the whole arguments on its head and the starting point I would say is those people arguing against using frozen Russian assets I would ask them, if we don't, how are we going to fund Ukraine's recovery and reconstruction and defence in the war?

And what happens if we fail to adequately finance its defence. I'd say, if we fail to fund Ukraine's defence and recovery, Ukraine will fail. Russian tanks will be on the border of Poland. There'll be a huge outmigration of Ukrainians, tens of millions will leave.

That will create huge social and political problems in Western Europe. We'll have huge defence spending because of that. We simply can't contemplate failure. So, we have to make sure Ukraine wins. As I've mentioned, I don't think the Western private sector will adequately fund Ukraine's recovery reconstruction.

I don't think there's political appetite in Western market democracies to fund the 50 a hundred billion dollars of recovery reconstruction. We just simply have to use the 350 billion. There's no other choice.

Now, in terms of the arguments against, lots of things have been used, as you mentioned, there's concern that if we seize frozen Russian assets in Western jurisdictions, Russia will go after Western assets, Western companies’ assets.

In Russia, I would argue that's already happening. Putin is already forcing many of those companies to sell to the Russian state to exit at cents on the dollar. I would also make an argument that in the end, these Western companies that are operating Russia, they're now whinging about the risks to their assets because we're going after frozen Russian assets.

Now, these are big boys. They made their own decisions. It was crystal clear what kind of regime the Putin regime was as far back as 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia.

Remember, there's a lot of focus on whether or not Russia would use weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine. It already used weapons of mass destruction twice in the territory of a NATO member, the Salisbury and Litvinenko.

And yet these Western companies thought it was okay, despite the clear warnings of their own governments to continue to operate in Russia, we should not be adjusting our national security interest and strategy to bail out Western companies that basically made bad investments in Russia. That's the reality.

So, I don't buy that argument. The other arguments are the reserve currency argument that if we go after frozen Russian assets, we move from immobilisation to freezing, to seizing and then allocation to Ukraine, it will send a very bad signal about the safety of our financial systems for other authoritarian regimes.

So, for example, you possibly could argue that the Chinese or the Saudis or whatever, the Gulf States would think twice about keeping their significant foreign exchange reserve assets in our jurisdictions.

Arguing against that, I would say, well, the signal has already been sent with Russia's assets immobilisation. Russia is probably not going to get the funds back. So, if you are a authoritarian regime and you've probably already moved your assets out of Western jurisdictions-

Jakub: And they're fine, people still use the dollar, and it hasn't lost that much strength.

Timothy: Well, the reality is there is no alternative. I mean, if the G7 act in unity and say, yes, we are going to freeze and seize and allocate to Ukraine, then China, for example, has a huge FX reserve position. There are simply no other international jurisdictions where it can dump its reserves, aside from Euro, dollar, sterling, Aussie dollar, CAD dollar. It has no alternative.

I mean, often these regimes don't really trust each other very much. I mean, I can't see the Chinese deciding to put their reserves in Russia, India, China. There are lots of tensions within these countries.

So, simply they have no alternative. And I think a really strong argument against this, look from a counter argument, freezing, seizing, sends a very strong signal to regimes or authoritarian regimes globally, that they should not do things like invading other countries, convicting genocide and war crimes.

They should behave themselves, and if they behave themselves, their assets are not under threat. So again, very weak arguments. In the end, if we want Ukraine to have a successful recovery, we have to simply use these assets.

Jakub: Yeah, I mean, it is an extraordinary threshold that Russia has crossed as a result of which its assets have been immobilised. This is not the kind of thing that, if you are, let's say, somewhat authoritarian, not quite the liberal Democrat, but you haven't invaded a neighbour, this is not something that you stumble into, like it's a major kind of policy decision.

They also knew what they were doing. So, this isn't sort of something that I think would be applied quite widely. I think Russia is a unique case in which assets are seized.

Timothy: Well, I think so. I mean, Saudi Arabia would probably be a good-

Jakub: Next in line.

Timothy: Well, but actually there's a different relationship between Saudi Arabia and the Western alliance. I mean, it's still clearly a partner. It's a partner in supplying obviously covered products to Western markets.

It's a huge market for Western defence goods. I think that the bar perhaps in Saudi Arabia would be far higher than Russia in terms of freezing assets. So, I just do not think that the dollar and the Euro are under threat because of this action.

Jakub: So, I'd love to talk a little bit about also what has been done in terms of sanctions on Russia, but maybe before that just to dive on this idea of seizing and using Russian assets in terms of what that could look like.

So, one story is obviously transferring these assets to Ukraine. I think that's something where we're still relatively far off from in terms of where the discussions are now amongst Western leaders.

The other option is essentially to have the interest of these Russian assets be transferred to Ukraine on an ongoing basis. Are we essentially sort of coming up with the idea of building an endowment for Ukraine that would help support the country over the longer period?

And is this a way to maybe insulate Ukraine from political risk, including Trump potentially becoming president in sort of a year's time?

Timothy: Well, I've been arguing for at least 18 months that frozen Russian assets are the only option for funding Ukraine's defence, and then successful recovery. And it seemed like we were getting nowhere until a few months ago.

And then suddenly things changed. I think things changed because there was recognition finally amongst Western political leaders that taxpayers won't fund the huge cost.

And obviously the prospect of Trump winning the U.S. elections in November. Then assuming office, I think in January 25, I was at Davos recently, and one theme was insulating Ukraine against Trump.

So, I think there's a realisation that if the frozen Russian assets can be earmarked for Ukraine, that provides long-term financing assurances for Ukraine.

Now, I would argue that we need to go after the underlying assets. Obviously, Europeans have got cold feet about that. They've been talking about using the returns or attacks on the returns of monies in Euroclear, particularly in Belgium, France, all these kind of places.

And the problem with that is, unfortunately it doesn't really touch the sides in terms of what Ukraine needs. I mean, the Euroclear profits, I think last year were around $4 billion, as I mentioned.

At the moment, the cost of Ukraine to the West is about a hundred billion dollars in war, and it's going to be 50 billion in peace. So, $4 billion is not enough. I worry that European leaders or European bureaucrats and lawyers are just using this as a wheeze to buy time to avoid doing what they need to do, which is actually go after the underlying assets.

And I don't really see the difference actually between seizing the underlying assets and seizing the interest on the investment’s income of those assets, frankly. If you're going to do it, you may as well go after the underlying assets.

Now you can think of some innovative solutions. Obviously, those assets are at the moment invested in high grade, low yielding instruments like U.S. treasuries or bonds or whatever. You could think outside the box. You could maybe invest them in a portfolio of EM assets that could yield 10% a year.

So, if you think about it, 350 billion, 10% a year, 35 billion a year. You could even think of something whereby Ukraine could issue its own recovery bonds. Russian assets could buy those or the people holding or managing those assets at the moment could buy those on behalf of the Russian states. If you get my drift.

Russia's underlying property rights would not be undermined. They would still hold the underlying assets, which in this case will be Ukraine recovery bond. The advantage for Ukraine, it would get big chunks of recovery and money.

It could even pay interest back to the accounts where Russian assets are held. And ultimately, if there's a peace deal and eventually a reparation agreement is made again, they could be a source for that.

So, we just need to think outside the box. And we always operate by — rules, where Russia, Putin always takes the gloves off. If we're going to win this war, we have to be clever than Putin.

And the European approach of just going after the low yielding 4 billion, it is just not enough. Unfortunately, we are two years into this, and some of us, like myself, have been arguing that this project is so important. Ukraine needs some kind of Ukraine recovery institution that will manage the whole process of recovery, including the funds from frozen Russian assets.

And we aren't really gone anywhere on that. I mean, as I said, most important projects since ’89, ‘91 . If you remember the big focus on transition planter market, the European Bank for reconstruction development was created specifically for that project.

It was so important, this transition from plant to market. We created this development institution, EBRD. It's been very successful. It's been so successful that it's diversified, its activities now beyond emerging Europe to Africa and all these other places.

It's kind of grown out of its original mandate. And actually, some people said EBRD should take up this role. I don't think so because its shareholder structure is too broad. It includes Russia, its mandate is too broad now.

We need a specific institution that absolutely it’s focus is entirely on Ukraine's recovery reconstruction. By creating such an entity, I think you send a really strong signal of the West commitment to this project.

You create a very strong leadership of it. It will be a joint entity, partially owned by G7 donors, but partially owned by Ukraine sovereign wealth idea. You can imagine that eventually it would be a hundred percent owned by the Ukrainians, let's say when they join the EU, it would become their entity.

It can be a partner for private investment into Ukraine. It will help drive reform because it's got leverage, because it's got strong funding, it can borrow on its own behalf. And I just don't really see much thought into this.

I mean, it's quite extraordinary. We have the military Ramstein, we really need an economic financial Ramstein for Ukraine. And I strongly think that we need an institution that is going to manage this process.

Jakub: First of all, let me just maybe briefly react to the idea of having the Russian assets being used to buy Ukrainian recovery bonds. That sounds absolutely sort of brilliant and historically kind of justified.

There's a question of whether these should be interest bearing at all, but certainly the idea of essentially having Russian money, Russian assets fuelling Ukrainian recovery and then hostage of it.

So, I imagine that they would immediately lose their rights to this asset should there be any further aggression on behalf of Russia against Ukraine? I mean, frankly, I don't see why couldn't get off the ground at least partially.

But yeah, in terms of the financial Ramstein, and for our listeners, a Ramstein in this context basically means a series of conferences to coordinate aid to Ukraine. What is holding that back?

Timothy: I just think it's about leadership. It's about joined up thinking, it's about Western leaders or a Western leader seizing the initiative and saying, publicly, “This project is so important, we need to do this.”

And they need to hire big characters, people to lead such an entity that have drive, vision. In the end, I guess it's the U.S. that has to lead this and make it happen. So, I think we need an additional strong signal, strong message from western liberal market democracies that this project is critical.

And I think we can only do that by creating, I would say a sovereign wealth fund style entity that's co-owned by G7 and Ukraine. And its responsibility is everything to do with Ukraine's recovery and reconstruction.

Jakub: No, that sounds quite valid. I mean, it feels like the EU is gradually gearing up to take a more leading role in supporting Ukraine and potentially planning for a Trump presidency where essentially the role of the U.S. … well, we don't know. Trump is nothing if not unpredictable, but most likely wouldn't be good for Ukraine.

And so, it feels like the EU is slowly moving in that direction, but obviously it's not an organisation that moves fast, that is driven by vision, it's driven by process, and that feels like something that is not quite the right fit at the moment.

Timothy: Well, I think the question is, is Europe able to fill the financing gap likely left by a failure to get the $61 billion approved in U.S. Congress, and then likelihood that Trump will pull away. And unfortunately, I think it's not.

And also, we have to accept, Orban failed to stop the 50 billion euros. But we have elections coming up in the European Union and that could change the whole political setup in Europe.

So, we need to Trump-proof Ukraine's financing and we need to basically do the same in Europe and that example, there's just no alternative but frozen Russian assets.

Jakub: Yeah. And so, just to drill down on the timing here. So, Ukraine is going to receive the 50 billion Euro package from the EU. There's a question about how quickly that can get over to Ukraine, which I think is in quite a difficult financial situation at the moment. But looking at the 2024 budget, is there any way to get around if the U.S. package doesn't come in?

Timothy: Well, no, because the 50 billion is a four-year program. So, that's 12, whatever you want to call it, 12 and a half, et cetera, for this year I'd imagine. I mean, it has 40 billion reserves it could possibly try and issue more domestic debt. It could print money, but that is inflationary. It puts pressure on the exchange rate, it risks macro instability. They need to fill those financing gaps.

Jakub: So, I wanted to ask about the strength of Russian sanctions and whether they are strong enough to do the job. What are the big things that we're missing? Should they be ramped up going forward?

Timothy: Yeah, sanctions. Look, sanctions are difficult. I mean, that's the reality. I mean, countries lodging sanctions want to make sure that the impact on the target is more than the backdraft to countries lodging the sanctions.

So, they're very, very complicated. We're in a global economy where there's lots of interplay and unintended consequences of going down a particular route. And they're not a silver bullet. They're only one part of a broader set of policies that aim to support Ukraine and undermine Russia's ability to wage war.

I think we've gone much further than I think anyone would ever have expected, actually. I mean, the energy sector have been sanctioned that no one really expected that swift on banks.

I think a lot of the focus now should be just tightening what we have already. I mean, obviously there's a lot of focus on third countries that are obviously helping Russia avoid sanctions.

I think there should be a ramp up in secondary sanctions, a warning to those countries of what happens if they're found out. So, in the end, I think there's been a change. I mean, if you think initially sanctions were imposed after annexation of Crimea, it was about getting Russia to change its actions.

I think now the reality is Russia has revealed itself to be a major threat, a military security threat to the West. We need to weaken Russia economy long-term because we need to reduce Russia's ability to regenerate its conventional military capability. That's a threat to us.

So, whatever happens in Ukraine now, I don't see a significant reduction in sanctions on Russia unless there's a regime change in Russia itself. So, they're going to remain in place for a long time. I think ultimately, they are working to undermine and weaken Russian economy.

A lot of focus on the fact that Russia, the IMF, have recently just adjusted its growth forecast up for Russia this year. But a couple of percentage points of growth is hardly a reflection of a booming economy.

It's surviving. Putin's had to make difficult choices, guns versus butter, eventually that will weigh on Russia's ability to conduct war long-term. It will weigh on his political support domestically. And one hopes that ultimately, it will change the decisions being made in Moscow.

There is one really interesting idea that I am quite supportive of, and it's going to zero … well, it's a hundred percent sanctions in a way. It's the West suggesting that in a period of couple of years down the line, or you set a date, two, three years down the line, you signal to your business that all trade with Russia will be subject to sanctions unless special designations are arrived at.

And obviously it's focused on dual technology stuff. That has obviously been a big problem. But you force Western business to explain exactly why they need to do business with Russia. Is this product so critical that we have to do it?

And I think by doing that, by setting this date for zero trade with Russia in effect, you will further encourage international business to get out of Russia. Continue to squeeze the Russian economy.

But with the designations, it still allows you in critical areas to continue to have access to Russian whatever it is, commodities or whatever where you absolutely need it.

But I think it reduces the ability of Russia to get some of those dual use goods that it's been using to continue to manufacture all this high-tech stuff in defence sector.

Jakub: Yeah, no, that sounds really interesting in terms of where this all can go. It feels like something that would be quite difficult for political leaders to — especially for the EU, that would just be so difficult to go through. But yeah, ultimately, I mean, you need to show that there's consequences for the actions.

So, turning to the topic of the week, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy decided that he wants to dismiss the Head of the Armed Forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi by all accounts, did not agree to resign of his own volition. It looks like Zelenskyy wants him out, but is struggling to find a replacement.

But in any case, what we're seeing is potentially quite difficult battle on the Ukrainian domestic political scene. And I think more broadly a resurgence of domestic politics.

In a way that is not surprising. I think people are maybe overestimating the ability for a country that is under war, that is a democracy where people can voice their opinions relatively on challenge to stick to a consistent political line for two years.

So, I think it was always a little bit too optimistic to assume that it would be completely untroubled waters throughout the whole period of time. But we do have a major conflict between arguably the two most important people in the country.

How is that kind of political risk factoring in to I think first of all, discussions with potential financial partners, bond holders, Western leaders, G7 in terms of pulling together financial resources to fund the Ukrainian ongoing needs and then recovery.

And secondly, more broadly, how is that likely to impact perhaps private capital and the broader set of stakeholders?

Timothy: Well, it's a bit difficult for me to comment on what's going on domestically on the politics side in Ukraine because I simply don't know. I'm not in the corridors of power where that's happening.

I mean, obviously, Ukraine's remarkable defence over the last two years has partially owed to the fact that you have seen unity. The opinion polls show strong support for Zelenskyy, strong support for Zaluzhnyi.

One has to be worried if we are in a scenario where that unity is under threat. We want the country to pull together to ultimately defeat Putin. If we're going to see squabbling and infighting within the elites, that's really disappointing, obviously.

But as you mentioned, I mean, Ukraine is a democracy. The elections are scheduled for this year. One obviously would like democratic process to play out, but it is a war.

So, I mean, you could understand why elections may not necessarily happen. All the territory is still occupied by Russia. A lot of Ukraine's population are not in a secure situation, can vote. Lots of soldiers are obviously away from their places of home or origin, whatever. And they're unable to vote.

It's challenging, but it's definitely a concern. I mean, one would hope that we don't see, or these kind of arguments are kind of resolved, that we don't see very public squabbles and focus continues to be on ensuring a victory in war and then focusing on what we need to do or what Ukraine needs to do to ensure a successful recovery and reconstruction.

Jakub: Absolutely brilliant discussion. Timothy, thank you so much for joining us on Power Lines.

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Timothy: My pleasure. Thank you.

[Speaking Foreign Language]

Jakub: Thanks so much for listening to this season of Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World. A big thank you to Timothy for his time today and to all of our amazing guests across the whole season.

While we're off the air, be sure to keep reading all our coverage of the war through the Kyiv Independent website and be sure to check out KI Insights and subscribe to our newsletter to understand the internal dynamics of what's happening behind the scenes in Ukraine.

Don't forget to subscribe and rate Power Lines wherever you get your podcast, as it really helps others find our show. To find more podcasts like Power Lines look up, Message Heard, wherever you're listening to this podcast. And find us on our website at messageheard.com or on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook by looking up at Message Heard.

You can also follow the Kyiv Independent on Twitter and Facebook at Kyiv Independent and Instagram at kyivindependent_official to get the latest news and stay up to date with our coverage. You can also support the Kyiv Independent through our website.

Season 2 Episode 9

Speakers: Jakub Parusinski & Federico Borsari

[Music Playing]

Jakub: Hello and welcome back to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World, a podcast from Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent. I'm Jakub Parusinski. Each week we're going to be analysing the undercurrents of the war in Ukraine, bringing you analysis from across the globe to explain its context and consequences as the war continues.

And this week we're taking a look at one of the most significant military developments of the war. A technology that has changed the nature of fighting in Ukraine and is having a huge impact on the future of military engagements across the globe, drone warfare.

The past two years of fighting in Ukraine have seen a multitude of types of combat. We've had urban warfare in the suburbs of Kyiv. We've had Blitzkriegs with tanks and armoured vehicles. We've had aerial strikes as well as trench warfare in the Donbas reminiscent of what fighting looked like a hundred years ago.

But we've also seen something that tells us about the future, drone warfare. To be clear, that means a lot of different things. Drones range from the kind of quadcopters that you see kids playing with in parks all across the world, to things that look basically like planes and are sent hundreds of kilometres behind enemy lines to disrupt supplies and target depots.

The use of drones has become incredibly creative and terrifying, and we see constant videos of drones dropping grenades on soldiers, even flying into trenches.

But behind that is also a massive scale. By some measures, Ukraine is losing up to 10,000 drones a month. So, we're talking about something that is unprecedented.

And behind all of that is a industry that has now formed and is producing a massive scale of drones, but that was initially built in many cases by volunteers simply taking drones and adapting them to the needs of modern warfare in garages.

But what was once a chaotic collection of individuals trying to build tools for their fighters has grown into something that is reshaping the war in Ukraine and perhaps reshaping warfare to come.

To learn more about Ukraine's flourishing drone industry, I got in touch with Federico Borsari. Federico is a Leonardo fellow at the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Centre of European Policy Analysis.

So, he's a colleague of Sam Greene, who we spoke with earlier this season about Russia. His work looks at Transatlantic Defense and Security dynamics with a focus on unmanned technologies and their military implications. That means drones.

He became really interested in this topic over the past four years and has published a number of fascinating reports on their use in Ukraine that I really recommend checking out.

I started off by asking him about some of the recent Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian soil and what they can tell us about the war.

Hi, Federico, welcome to Power Lines.

Federico: Hi, Jakub. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

Jakub: We're speaking on January 23rd, but just two days ago on January 21st, Ukrainian drone strikes hit a Russian gas terminal near St. Petersburg. Attacks like these have become more frequent over the past year. What does that tell us about the place of drones in this war right now and going forward into 2024?

Federico: Yeah, so as you mentioned, the number of attacks in Russia conducted by Ukraine has increased over the past year. And I think what we are seeing is a trend whereby Ukraine is using drones to strike targets deep into Russian territory much more than it was doing in the first year of the invasion.

Even though I would say, the recent strikes actually follow a long series of similar attacks that began in the second half of 2022 and one of these first such attacks took place in June that year. And so, the use of a Chinese commercial Mugin-5 fixed wing drone, which was packed with explosive, and it was used to strike and all … in the Rostov region.

So, it was a similar let's say attack to what happened a couple of days ago near St. Petersburg. And it shows that Ukraine is now able to use drones to deliver strategic effects, basically against Russia and to compensate to certain extent for the lack of long-range missiles.

This is certainly an important development because we know that Ukraine has been asking Western partners and allies for more missiles, but we also know that due to a number of reasons, these missiles have not been delivered in the numbers necessary to tip the balance in favour of Ukraine, at least when it comes to long range capabilities.

So, drones are now very important for Ukraine to strike in depth against Russia. And we know that Ukraine has a lot of drones of this type, like the UJ-22, the Bober or the AQ-400. These are drones that are bigger than commercial quadcopters, for instance, and are used for this purpose.

Jakub: Yeah. So, maybe just to help our audience picture this a little bit, just going over a little bit what we mean by drones, because I think a lot of the time when people talk about drones, people think about these quadcopters that are flying around, maybe providing some footage.

Right now, we're talking about something that looks a lot more like, I guess a small plane or a missile. What other kind of types of drones have been used here?

Federico: Yeah, yeah, that's correct. We have seen a very quick and rapid evolution in the shape and design of drones in the war in Ukraine. And I would say, we can start by saying that actually Ukraine and also Russia did have a lot of drones already at the beginning of the invasion almost two years ago.

But that was based on the military necessity of the two countries at that time. So, no one was expecting drones to become so important for warfare.

So, as the invasion actually started and continued, we have seen an evolution in the design and of the system that have been used by the two sides. And we have a whole kind of different drones today being used and this range from small commercial quadcopters.

So, using four propellers that you can buy on the internet very easily, to first-person view drones that are used to, for instance, strike targets at short range and first-person view drones are quite interesting because they are actually commercial racing drones that are used by hobbyists.

We have seen also a lot of medium-sized fixed wing drones similar to small planes in a way, in design. And that there are many, many different models that I can mention.

The Orlan and Zala drones used by Russia, but also, the Leleka-100 for instance, used by Ukraine or the Shark used by Kyiv forces.

And then we have larger systems. These are of course more expensive. And the Bayraktar TB2, for instance, is one of the most famous. And it has created kind of aura in the public. And also, there is also a song entitled the TB2.

Jakub: Indeed, there's a song about Bayraktar. And I think for a while, even in Ukraine, people were naming their dogs and even in some cases their children by Bayraktar just because of how popular it had become.

But you mentioned something that was quite interesting. So, both Ukraine and Russia had drones coming into the full-scale invasion, but it feels like, or at least it sounds like there has been a revolution in terms of the importance of drones for modern warfare.

Is it more about a question of quality that the drones have evolved? Is it a question of scale of just how widely there are used or even creativity that they are now used in new applications that perhaps people had not thought of before, or as always all of the above?

Federico: Yeah, no, it's a combination of reasons. I would say that at the beginning of the conflict, as I mentioned, so no one was expecting drones to play such an important role.

So, the number of drones incorporated into the two sides' militaries was small or not as big as it is today, of course. But we have seen the importance of drone changing according to the operational needs and the resources of the actors involved into this conflict.

Of course, it's important to remember that the nature of the war in Ukraine is very, very specific. And it's a risk to try to compare Ukraine with other examples. So, every conflict has its own nature and features.

But I would say that of course, the operational needs have changed, and this is why drone have become so important in the conflict for both sides.

But it was Ukraine that initially mastered and pioneered the use of drone compared to Russia. And so, we started to see commercial quadcopters being used in increasing numbers by Ukrainian forces because they needed ways to monitoring the battlefield, monitoring the frontline, and making sure the movement of Russians were known to the command.

And so, they used commercial drones for surveillance, reconnaissance purposes early on during the invasion. And we have seen this trend increasing at fast pace in the following months.

And as Ukraine became so good at using small commercial quadcopters. I'm referring to DJI drones and many other types of commercial quadcopters. Also, Russia started to adapt actually. And so, we have seen also this kind of adaptation trend in the conflict by Russia.

Jakub: Various countermeasures.

Federico: Countermeasures, correct. And also, resources played, of course, a huge role because since the very beginning, Ukraine was in a position of disadvantage compared to Russia.

I mean, not just in terms of the military budget the two countries had before the invasion, but also in terms of the capabilities. So, for Ukraine was basically essential just to use drones to compensate for the lack of other means.

We have seen how good simply Ukraine has become in using drones and innovating in the tactics and techniques its forces use on the battlefield with drones.

Jakub: Looking back at the experience of the military with drones both in the past but also in other theatres, is this something that has been around for a while? Has it already been employed in other conflicts? I'm thinking towards the Middle East, for example.

Federico: Yeah, I mean, of course the use of drones, it's not new. I mean, the United States and also Israel were the two countries that first introduced on crude systems many, many decades ago.

And the systematic use of drones started to appear, I would say in the early 2000 when the United States launched the global war on terror and drones became very useful tool to owned terrorist and remote places because of the endurance and the silence also of drones compared to fighter jets.

But we witnessed a substantial change recently because if at the beginning drones were used just by a handful of countries in very permissive environments without air defences or other threats to drones, and were used just for counter-terrorism operations or counterinsurgency operations.

Now we are seeing drones and all types of drones being used, not just by state actors, but also by non-state actors.

I think it's important to … just to give you an example and a figure of this trend, in 2010, for instance, there were around more or less 60 countries that had a military drone program, and in a matter of 13 years, so today we have that number almost doubled.

So, we are around 115 countries having a military drone program. And this is just, when it comes to state actors. If we also had non-state actors, so terrorist groups or insurgents or even criminal cartels, that number is much higher.

And this means that drones are now in the arsenal of basically every kind of organisation. And we have seen the use of commercial drones for military purposes already in the Middle East, as you mentioned, in Iraq and Syria.

Jakub: Did ISIS use drones?

Federico: ISIS, yes, of course used drones to strike Iraqi security forces and also Western units during its campaign in Iraq and Syria. So, this is telling about the proliferation of drones across the world. So, this is a trend that is only poised to increase and to expand in the future.

Jakub: So, this expansion requires a lot of people to operate them. They're unmanned aerial vehicles, but that's because there's people who are on the ground operating them or at least setting them up, preparing them. How much training goes into producing a drone operator and what does that training look like?

Federico: Yeah, it's not as simple as it might seem, because it requires skills, it requires very competent operators and pilots that must go through a quite difficult training. So, it requires a few weeks at least, of course, depending on how much time do you have every day to train.

And also, depending on the sophistication of the system, because of course, if we talk about training for the use of high-altitude drone, like the MQ-9 Reaper, for instance, which is one of the most famous military drones today, well, that require a lot of time.

So, months of training, if not more, and then continuous experimentation and experience with a platform. But if we talk about quadcopters, then a couple of weeks maybe are enough to have the basics, to pilot the system and to move it around.

And then also comes the ability to read the feedback from their sensor. So, what the camera shows you or how to drop munitions effectively from that kind of drone. And this means more days of training.

But there are huge differences based on the sophistication. And it's not just the pilot, it's also the operator which sometimes is a second person that helps the pilot actually to navigate the environment and use the feedback from the sensor of the drone.

Jakub: That's very interesting. And coming back to something that you mentioned earlier, which was specifically about the countermeasures that are put in place. So, if we look over the past two years, we've seen the incredible rise in the use of drones initially led by Ukraine. And now my sense is that it's probably a bit more balanced. Russia is also using drones quite extensively.

But also, there are more and more defences put in place against drones. And I think one thing that it's important for people to realise is that there's this image of a drone operator as being a relatively safe job when it comes to the military.

You're not in the trenches, you're not sort of storming any positions, but actually it turns out that there's quite a lot of casualties in those specialties as well. So, could you tell us a little bit about what the difficulties are that both drone operators and drones themselves are running into?

Federico: Yeah, absolutely. Just to give you an example, based on the information that we have, and also talking with a lot of people that have been in Ukraine or even with Ukrainian personnel directly, immediately, they mentioned that being a drone operator is definitely not a safe role in the military because drone operators and pilots are one of the first targets Russians are looking for when they start their attacks or their operations.

So, this means that that type of roles in the military are becoming more and more important, especially not just for Ukraine. I guess also for Russia now given the number of drones that Russia is using.

But this means that it's not just about the training for using the technology, it's also about the training on how to conceal, how to hidden in the environment to make sure you are not located by the enemy.

And at the same time, this also of course requires a lot of countermeasures and ways to avoid being detected. So, it's not just about electronic warfare, it's also about discipline in the electromagnetic magnetic spectrum.

So, make sure not to give away your position or make sure the system harden it against jamming, spoofing and other electronic warfare techniques that can reveal your location and make you a target for the enemy.

Countermeasures, of course, can be of different types. You have active countermeasures, you have passive countermeasures, so concealing if you use nets or other obstacles to protect your position, it's another passive countermeasure.

And then you have active, of course, countermeasure, such as the use of anti-drone guns or electronic warfare systems to protect your position against enemy drones.

Jakub: What is an anti-drone gun?

Federico: Well, it's a weapon that uses radio frequency jamming or spoofing to disrupt the communication signal between the drone and its operator, or also to disrupt the navigation signal of the drone in order to basically down it or make it uncontrollable for the pilot.

Then you have anti anti-drone guns that use microwave to damage the circuit of the drone. So, you have many different types of country guns, but these two are the most common types.

Jakub: I mean, this is absolutely fascinating. And if you think about sort of this idea that drones represent the future of warfare or a piece of that, certainly using microwave and electromagnetic tools to sort of disrupt certainly fits into that image.

Behind sort of the scenes of all of the operators who are working on the front lines, concealing themselves, trying to pierce through the countermeasures of their opponents lies quite a substantial industrial machine.

And I think one of the big things that has appeared over the past two years in Ukraine certainly is quite a vast drone industry, I think quite fragmented. So, there's a lot of different pieces to it. Some are bigger, some are very sort of volunteer driven.

Could you tell us a little bit about sort of what that drone industry looks like and perhaps how it compares to the Russian one because I imagine that they might be quite different.

Federico: No, indeed it is different. You are absolutely right, and the gap between the two cases has increased, especially in the past few months as Russia started to really centralise the effort of volunteering organisations in Russia to provide drones to the military.

But coming back to Ukraine, I would say, it has been in the making, it has been an evolving phenomenon, an evolving industry, I would say. And before the start of the invasion, there weren't many drone companies in Ukraine.

There were a few, they were building drones sometimes for the military, sometimes for commercial or agricultural purposes. But at the same time, it was not a scale production.

It was not a big production of drones before the invasion. Then all of a sudden with the military that needed a lot of drones, many companies repurposed their production and started to provide more and more drones to the military.

And in the same time, a lot of volunteering efforts and civil society organisations started to fund drones for the military buying them off the shelf or sourcing components from abroad and assembling them in Ukraine.

In this overall picture, we have today around 200 companies that currently produce germs or drone components for the Ukrainian military. And according to data that I have compiled together with my CEPA colleague, Skip Davis, who is also the co-author of a report that we have recently published for CEPA on drone warfare in Ukraine.

We have classified more than 50 different drones being used by Ukraine alone. And this number continues to grow because it doesn't account for customised systems that are assembled even on the frontline.

So, there have been of course efforts by the government of Ukraine to optimise and to improve this kind of picture and this kind of structure when it comes to drone production.

And there have been initiatives like the Army of drones, which is a joint initiative of the digital transformation ministry and the governmental United24 fundraising platform, for instance, this was launched in July 2022. And it came to really bring together funders and developers to create a more unified framework and an architecture to produce.

So, as you mentioned, you are right, even though there is this centralization effort by the government at the same time, there is a continued emergence of a patchwork of passionate grassroots organisations that are producing drones directly for units within the military.

This is interesting because you have organisations or initiatives like Angry Birds, for instance, which has raised over $800,000 for FPV drones alone. So, you have these two parallel, let's say, directions and initiatives, and it's very crucial for Ukraine to try to optimise as much as it can these effort, because otherwise you risk to have a lot of duplication and waste of resources to a certain extent.

So, this is one side. On the other side, such a huge number of terms means that it becomes much more difficult for the Russians to counter all of them because they are operating on many different frequencies. They have different characteristics.

And so, it's more difficult for the Russian air defences to know what drones they are dealing with, for instance.

Jakub: That's interesting.

Federico: Yeah, this is very interesting, I think, and just to give you some data on Ukraine, for instance, just in 2023, the Ukrainian government allocated $1.8 billion just for the drone industry last year, basically.

And in 2024, it plans to acquire 1 million drones. So, this means, 1 million drones is a huge number. These, of course, are mostly expandable drones or treatable drones that are used one time because they are kamikaze drone, basically.

So, one way attack system that are directed against the target, and that's it. But this is telling because it gives you an idea of the scale of drone warfare currently in Ukraine.

And according to some estimates, Ukraine is losing to Russian air defences and electronic warfare up to 10,000 drones per month. And I think this number is now even higher because this estimate was based on data from last year. So, today probably is double that number.

And just to conclude the comparison with Russia, it's important because we know that Russia, as I mentioned before, is centralising the initiative of volunteers and private organisations to provide drones to the military.

And so, this means that the state is behind this initiative and it's pouring funds, it's pouring also infrastructure and production lines, for instance, for this organisation to increase their capacity. And this means it could give Russia the upper hand, for instance, against Ukraine in 2024.

So, this means Ukraine needs to really increase its centralization efforts as well. It needs to improve some of the initiatives it's doing.

Jakub: It's fascinating the extent to which sort of the Russian and the Ukrainian approach are emblematic of both countries and how different they are. You've got Ukraine on the one side, which seems like it's very bottom up.

It's a large number of people who are maybe duplicating their efforts, but that are quite passionate. They're doing their own thing. It's quite creative, but probably a bit chaotic and it's difficult to scale.

And then you've got Russia on the other side, which is coming at it quite top down, trying to centralise things where you essentially get scale out of that and you can start to operate on a very high level, but maybe you get the kind of problems that come with standardisation.

And it's really fascinating that you mentioned that electronic warfare and being able to counter a specific model is something that Ukraine is benefiting from. And I imagine for Russia, that's the part where it's a little bit more difficult.

And you mentioned that quite a lot of the units themselves are buying the drones. So, I imagine that the amount of money that the government is allocating while you need to add what the volunteers and sort of the units themselves are buying on top of that, is there also any Western support that's coming to Ukraine's aid?

Federico: Yes, there has been quite a substantial support from Western partners to Ukraine, not just on the drone side, but overall, for many other military equipment and capabilities.

But yes, when it comes to drones, I mean many Western countries and European companies as well have provided a lot of different drone systems to Ukraine.

Mainly, I would say small and fixed wing tactical drones that are used for intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance purposes. Germany, for instance, has provided a lot of this type of drones. Poland has provided loitering munitions.

The U.S. has also provided a lot of loitering munitions. The Switchblade family for instance is quite famous produced by air environment in the U.S.

And also, the secretive Phoenix Ghost. It's another model that the U.S. have provided Ukraine with, and these are important efforts, but we know that the needs on the battlefield are increasing in terms of quantities that are required by frontline units to deal with Russia.

And also because Russia is scaling up its attacks now. So, this means that given the lack of conventional artillery for Ukraine, drones are becoming more and more important.

And I would say in this case, first-person view drones, which are the tiniest models that have been seen in Ukraine so far but are becoming deadlier by the day because they are literally very, very easy to manoeuvre.

They are very also easy to use. They are cheap. They can be produced at scale. They are not too difficult to assemble with components. And you can attach all kind of different war ads and munition to this type of drone.

And they are flown against the target directly through the input of the pilot who sees basically the video field from its goggle connected to the drone.

So, these are systems that are mostly sort from China. But now that China's restricted drones’ components actually exports especially to Ukraine, it becomes more complicated for Ukraine to have necessary material to assemble terms at scale.

And this is why Ukraine is trying to increase the imports from Europe, from other countries as well to compensate for that.

Jakub: So, there's Western support in terms of financially helping Ukraine sort of scale up its production, is there also support in terms of innovation, whether it's in terms of materials or replacing Chinese components?

I imagine that Western partners might have quite a bit of know-how, when it comes to electronic warfare, or perhaps I'm wrong, but is that something that we're seeing at scale?

Federico: Yes, that's right. Western countries have provided also multiple counter U.S. systems and advice on how to defeat Russian drones. We don't have specific numbers or date on this, I would say.

But we know that many Western and European countries actually have, have delivered counter U.S. technology to Ukraine, both in terms of portable systems that can be used at the tactical level.

So basically, on the trenches along the trench line in the east to bigger system that, that are used to protect fixed infrastructure, for instance. So, it's always a cat and mouse game when it comes to counter U.S.

And at the beginning of the conflict of the invasion, Ukraine had the upper end when it comes to drone technology, was able to evade Russian electronic warfare.

But as you know Russia started to deploy more and more electronic warfare capabilities in Ukraine, in theatre then for Ukraine, it was more and more difficult to fly drones along the front line, but the signal was constantly spoofed and jammed.

And so, they had to adapt, and this is how innovation works. And Ukrainian engineers have been able to adapt their drones to protect them from jamming by simply modifying the inner structure, the components that have been used or changing the software sometimes.

And the same time also Russia tried to increase and improve its electronic warfare techniques. So, it's always a cat and mouse game as I mentioned, that is changing really by the day, I would say. And we'll see constantly this phenomenon going on in the conflict.

Jakub: Looking sort of internationally. Where would you expect this kind of drone warfare to surface in the future? And how might it kind of adapt?

Obviously, I assume that we're hoping that in as few places as possible but looking at the state of the world today and being a little bit more realistic it's quite likely to show up in different places.

And I'm thinking now about for example, in the Middle East, between Saudi Arabia and Iran, there's already a fair history of drone warfare between the two. Are there other hotspots that are likely to see the emergence and growth of drone warfare?

Federico: Well, I think so. I think, the overall trajectory of drone warfare I mean, is now quite straightforward. And we will likely see drones playing a huge role in future conflicts.

Drones are basically very important, if not fundamental for today's military operations and their role, it's poised to increase exponentially, I would say in the next decades.

And use of drones has really changed also the way military operations are conducted, and especially in Ukraine. I wouldn't apply these lessons in the same way for every conflict, of course, because every conflict, as I mentioned at the beginning of this recording, is different.

But at the same time, we know that drones have changed quite a lot in the operational picture. And of course, what we are seeing today is that drones are cheaper than fighter jets, and they don't have the same capabilities for now.

But as technology improves, we will see more sophisticated drones to conduct operations that today are conducted by fighter jets and meaning, long range strike, I mean air to air combat.

So, we are seeing an evolution in the capabilities of drones. And this means that as the technology expands, the technology becomes more sophisticated, but also more available on the market.

The prices are decreasing to a certain extent for specific types of drones. So, we will see a proliferation of these capabilities across the world and more and more countries will use drones for their military operations. That's for sure.

And this is not just about drones in the air domain. We are seeing similar trend in the naval or maritime domain and all also on the ground because we have seen how Ukraine has been able basically to use drones or crude naval vessels, basically and crude vessels to change the operational picture in the Black Sea.

Russia isn't able anymore to use its Black Sea fleet as it did at the beginning of the conflict because of the presence of kamikaze vessels used by Ukraine to disrupt naval operations by Russia and to threat the Black Sea fleet and to force Russia to move ships away from Crimea because of the threat from these drones.

So, this has been a huge victory for Ukraine. This is an example that many countries will look to when it comes to naval operations, because I mean, Ukraine is now able to export its grain again to control the shores of the Black Sea when it was not able to do so at the beginning of the conflict.

So, and this was thanks to drones. And coming back to your example of Saudi Arabia and Iran. Yeah, well, I mean, we are already seeing how Iranian drone have wreak havoc on Ukraine's infrastructure and territory.

And I think this is the most recent example, but we have seen also Iran using drones against Saudi Arabia oil infrastructure in 2019 and in 2020 as well.

And this trend has now changed in that same region with the Houthi group using Iranian drone and Iranian provided technology to strike merchant vessels in the Red Sea and in the Persian Gulf.

So, this trend is not surprising, and drones will continue to play a major role, and this will only expand in the coming months, I would say.

Jakub: Just to sort of close things off, I'd love to get your thoughts on what does Ukraine's future look like within this sort of perspective.

On the one hand, you've got a lot of experience, know-how, industrial capabilities to produce drones.

On the other hand, it sounds like drones are relatively cheap to make pretty much anywhere where you have enough sort of skilled knowledge base and industrial capacity, and they need to be adapted quite a bit to local circumstances.

Does Ukraine have the capacity to become a drone hub and to keep that position for a while, or is that something that's more likely to be temporary?

Federico: No, I don't think it's temporary. I think Ukraine actually is now a major power when it comes to drone technology, not just because of I would say the capability of producing drones at scale, but also because Ukraine has now the experience, has a huge experience in using this technology.

And this is a very important aspect because sometimes we tend to look at the impact of technology considering how capable is the technology and how sophisticated it is.

But technology is only half the story basically. Because you also need to integrate it into your first structure. You also need to incorporate the technology in your units and make sure you have the proper concept of operations and doctrine to exploit the potential of the technology.

So, this means that for Ukraine, it's just the beginning. I think in terms of drone technology, they have a huge experience on how they can use drones.

And so, what it needs to do is to really centralise a little bit more the efforts in terms of production, in terms of channelling the funds for the right systems and the right projects without the risk of duplications. Because of course you have many type of drones as I mentioned, but at the same time, there are many similarities.

And so, how it's possible to best combine the technology according to the operational needs without wasting resources. So, that's a question that Ukrainian policy makers and experts need to answer to.

And I think that for the future and for the coming months, it's very important for Ukraine to continue to use FPV drones because these are basically compensating for the lack of artillery.

But at the same time, it would be a mistake to bathe only on drones’ technology to achieve victory or results on the battlefield.

You also need to integrate drones with your let's say, in a broader military architecture where you have different type of capabilities that work in synergy. And I'm referring to artillery. I'm referring to electronic warfare. I'm referring to commanding control.

And Ukraine has provided us with a lot of good insights and examples on how to best do it doing it. So, what Ukraine needs to do is to continue along this path and also to push Western allies as much as it can fight artillery, I think munitions and missiles, because I mean, for now, drones cannot yet replace missiles in terms of the impact they deliver on the battlefield.

So, I'm not saying drones will not be able to do it because we know the technology's evolving and it's already there when it comes to long range strikes. And Ukraine has shown us that it can do it against Russia already today.

But to do it at scale and to deliver effects that are robust, you need missiles and I think here is a responsibility of Western countries and Europeans and all Western allies to provide this kind of capabilities to Ukraine because drones alone are not game changers. This is something I tend to repeat when I speak about drones.

Jakub: Thank you so much Federico, this has been absolutely fascinating and I'm sure that we could continue this conversation for a lot longer. Thank you so much for joining us on Power Lines today. It was an absolutely fascinating discussion.

Federico: Thank you so much for having me and looking forward to the next time.

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Jakub: Thanks so much for listening to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World, and a big thanks to Federico for his time speaking with us.

We'll be back in two weeks’ time with the final episode of this season where we'll be looking at the macroeconomic challenges that Ukraine will have to deal with in the year ahead.

Don't forget to subscribe and rate Power Lines wherever you get your podcast, as it really helps others find our show.

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Season 2 Episode 8

Speakers: Jakub Parusinski & Francis Farrell

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Jakub: Hello and welcome back to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World, a podcast from Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent. I'm Jakub Parusinski.

Each week we're going to be analysing the undercurrents of the war in Ukraine, bringing you analysis from across the globe to explain its context and consequences as the war continues.

This week, we're taking a look at one of the most fundamental things that Ukraine needs to continue its war effort, people fighting on the front lines because the issue of mobilisation is causing debate and consternation in the Ukrainian government and in Ukrainian society.

At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the world was astonished to see these lines of Ukrainian men at the border returning from life and work abroad ready to serve their country.

But after two years of ferocious fighting and horrendous losses on both sides, both Russia and Ukraine are suffering shortages of manpower. Russia has filled the void with immigrants, convicts, factory workers, all press ganged into serving the Russian Army. They've even forcibly mobilised Ukrainians living on occupied territories.

Ukraine initially relied significantly on volunteers and has gradually mobilised people throughout the period of the war. But readiness to serve is not a binary. It falls on a spectrum, and the people most inclined to fight are now becoming scarce. Actually, they need to be rotated out.

People are also much more conscious of just how brutal the fighting is, and are much more reticent as a result, especially of being sent to the hotspots where shelling and living in trenches are a daily reality.

The current mobilisation is failing to deliver the numbers that Kyiv needs as we shift towards a long war, hence the new drive, up to half a million new recruits and new legislation to make that happen.

But that raises very difficult questions. Specifically, who should be called up first? At its most cynical, Ukrainian society is now asking itself, who are we ready to sacrifice for the survival of the rest?

To learn more about this issue, I'll be speaking to Francis Farrell, the Kyiv Independent war correspondent. Before joining us, he was the managing editor at the online media project, Lossi 36, and a freelance journalist and documentary photographer.

Over the past two years, Francis has been travelling across the country to its front lines, meeting all kinds of people who have been mobilised. So, he has a real on the ground view of how this is affecting all sorts of Ukrainians.

Hi Francis. Welcome to Power Lines.

Francis: Hi Jakub. It's great to be here.

Jakub: We are speaking on Wednesday, January 10th, and last week on January 4th, the Ukrainian government proposed changes to the rules on mobilisation that would have a dramatic impact on who is called up to the front lines.

Can you give us an outline of what this new proposed law looks like and how it has been received by Ukrainians.

Francis: Yeah, so the first murmur that we heard that this was likely on horizon was actually during Zelenskyy’s press conference. I think it was actually the very first question that he answered on the 19th of December when he basically made a claim that the military has requested the mobilisation of about 450 to 500,000 new soldiers for the next year.

And so, there's that basic need. Later Zaluzhnyi in his own press conference, which was a week after the initial draft law was proposed by the cabinet of ministers, said that there wasn't such a specific request, but still this draft law did get proposed.

And it's worth remembering that Ukrainian military is now a majority mobilised military. In a similar way to Russia, although it's just not worth pretending that it's all patriotic guys who went to volunteer from the start.

So, there are already many, many mobilised troops in the Ukrainian military, but since people don't really go to volunteer anymore, there is this huge need for more people.

So, what the draft law is about, and as you mentioned, it could change a lot. We can talk about the status of it at the moment, but what the draft law is about is about widening the scope of people who can be mobilised, introducing more serious consequences for those who try and evade it.

And overall, just streamlining the process, basically giving the government and the military, the defence ministry the muscle it needs to get these larger numbers of people for the military, which is just again, absolutely a necessity.

So, if we can talk about some of the details, like how they imagine actually doing this. Again, this is the draft law. So, a lot of this is very controversial and still might not make it into the final agreement, but we're talking about the conscription age reduced from 27 to 25.

For example, there's talk about introducing electronic conscription system through the same really innovative electronic government services program that Ukraine has talking about potentially putting basically those who are fine to evade service basically in a similar legal position.

And they're still being debated by these committees and will be debated in parliament as well.

And the other thing is the idea of potentially seeing an end date, which is kind of counterintuitive to the need to just get more people into the army, but I think the leadership finally understands that the social problems, which will be inevitably caused by this, could be alleviated to a great extent by having just the idea of an end date so that you can be discharged.

People are discussing whether it should be 36 months or three years or a year and a half or something in between. So, people who could be mobilised don't necessarily see it, “Well, oh that's it, I'm probably not coming out of this alive. There's a specific end date when I can come back home to my family.”

Jakub: So, a lot to unpack there. I think maybe just coming back to some of the changes in terms of how rigorous the proposed mobilisation law looks like right now. So, you mentioned sort of this loss of access to local services, basically if you're on the debtor's list, if I understand correctly, under the new law.

And again, this is the proposal, it might change quite a bit and I think we should unpack the direction that it's moving in a little bit later.

I've heard that there's consideration about potentially even losing access to bank accounts, no longer being able to leverage various government services. So, that seems rather draconian what has been the response.

Francis: So, undoubtedly this is the kind of one of the biggest issues so far in this year, of course, that all Ukrainians are talking about. And it's very sensitive because people are talking about this being draconian or this being potentially a violation of constitutional rights of Ukrainian citizens.

But at the same time, you can't really come out against the idea of the need to mobilise more people in general because that is just objective for Ukraine's survival.

And so, people are discussing it in this kind of tense way. But part of what makes this so kind of controversial for the population is, and we can talk more about this later, but it's about how not only the legal kind of framework within which mobilisation would be carried out.

But also, the actual way it's carried out in practice by the recruiting officers who have this very already dirty reputation for A, a lot of corruption and B, quite rough practices, heavy handed practices of packing people away into buses from the street or raiding gyms because that's where all the young fit men are hanging out.

Jakub: Yeah, I've heard reports that recruitment officers are hanging out near sport clubs, gyms, all that, especially across the mid-sized cities of Ukraine.

Francis: Yeah, just a kind of interesting, funny example. Between Christmas and New Year, I was in Drahobrat skiing for the first time in three years. It's a cheaper ski resort. It's quite Soviet and chaotic in many ways.

And then the day after I left, there was all this social media chatter about these recruiting officers who had showed up at the ski resort. So, there were pictures posted on social media of them walking around in uniform, even with their rifles.

It was just an interesting kind of prism in which to look at the society's reaction to this in the comments of these posts on social media because you had some people very angry saying, “This is going too far. This is just a place where young people want to rest and relax in the holidays after the hard years we've all had, and now they need to be afraid of recruitment officers.”

And then you have other people who might be saying, “Well, I mean, it's what we need. I mean, no one should be safe, privileged people who are out there skiing shouldn't think that they won't be sent to war.”

And then you have some soldiers saying, “Yeah, that's what we like to see. If they're young, if they're doing sport, then they should go to the army.”

And then you have other people who are saying, “Well, why aren't they in Bukovel? Because Bukovel is the much posher, fancier ski resort in Ukraine, very kind of European standards and known to be a popular hangout place for the elite of the country.”

And it's like, “Well, why aren't we seeing the recruitment guys in Bukovel? Drahobrat is more of a people's resort.”

So, you can just see all of this very complicated social kind of murmurings and emotions concerning this. But it's something we'll see a lot more of in the next months, I'm sure.

Jakub: So, there's obviously a huge political dimension to this. One thing, as you mentioned with the press conferences of Zelenskyy and Zaluzhnyi, Zelenskyy came out with a specific number of 450, 000 to half a million. Zaluzhnyi kind of said that he didn't want to say anything specific.

But my understanding was that everyone came out with the feeling that the number's probably around there, he just doesn't want to disclose it for sort of military confidence reasons.

Given that they both came out talking about mobilisation, is that a sign that there is an alignment between the two? Over the past weeks especially, we've had rising reports about the tensions between Zelenskyy and Zaluzhnyi.

Do you feel like them coming out and both talking about mobilisation, a politically painful issue, is a sign that things between them are cooling off or that they've got a better working relationship?

Francis: It's a really tricky one. At Zaluzhnyi’s press conference, I was very happy to see the defence minister Rustem Umerov, who was appointed not too long ago.

And my personal impression was that they had a very cordial relationship. They were kind of smiling and joking around a bit. And that gave me hope that when it comes to this need for the military high command and the civilian government of Ukraine to cooperate on some of the most challenging things like mobilisation, for example, it gave me hope there.

With Zelenskyy, unfortunately, I think it's not that simple. It's hard to say if this is a cooling off, I think everyone would really hope for them to just be able to sit down and work together in the most effective way possible.

But just overall, the feeling from Zelenskyy’s press conference was, he was kind of questioning his own military with the figure of 450 to 500,000. He was saying, I'm not sure if that's a fair number, if that's a just number. I haven't been given enough real evidence that why we need that many people exactly.

And then he went on onto another thing about wanting to kind of stand up for civilians and defend civilians a bit, because civilians can be a bit maligned by some people, by the military, for example, for not doing enough and saying, you need six civilians to fund one serviceman in the military and saying these things.

So, there is an argument to be made there that basically Zelenskyy understands that the social backlash caused by expanding this mobilisation and kind of getting more tough with it is eventually going to come back at him. Because everything leads to him at the end of the day. He's the supreme commander in chief and the president of the country.

It seemed like he was trying to kind of position himself in a way that this is what the military being his perceived rival, like Zaluzhnyi, this is what they want. They want to drag so many of you off to the war, and I'm trying my best to make sure it's as fair as possible. And to kind of go easy on the civilians a little bit.

Because unfortunately this all is happening in the context of an objective understanding that politics has returned to the country. Thankfully, everyone's understood that elections are impossible, but political competition, jostling kind of perception of who is becoming more popular is definitely back.

And there are polls with trust ratings coming out and people are looking at them and unfortunately, this is happening.

Jakub: So, this is the definition of sort of a political hot potato. It's obviously a difficult decision to make, but one that is necessary for the country. I think we should get into why that's necessary in a little bit.

But as you mentioned, politics is coming back to Ukraine. There have been rival or alternative mobilisation legislation submitted over the past week.

There's been various opponents of the ruling Sluha Narodu Party that have voiced either various populous messages or have used the mobilisation laws to criticise the government. What's your take on what is happening on the political field and how mobilisation is being used?

Francis: I think at the moment what we can see is that, yeah, it's a very strange, blurred lines or maybe a Venn diagram of sorts between what is making the right decisions for the country and what is playing politics.

I think lots of people have raised concerns with different aspects of the draft law. You had one committee saying that the whole equivalence of draft dodgers and debtors is just not really properly legal, that we had the ombudsman talking about dangers to constitutional human rights.

And then you have a lot of more kind of rational concerns about, for example, a certain disability group now becoming eligible for the draft.

And then there's the whole idea of people of some of the aspects of the draft law basically allowing for corruption in the recruiting officers and that kind of thing.

So, at this point, things are moving so fast and it's a bit hard to judge exactly where we stand. I do think it's pretty much a fair argument to make that a lot of the opposition people who've come out with concerns about some aspects of the law, whether it be the electronic drafts, notices or the disability groups or the thing about the end date of service. There's definitely some politics being played there.

No one's going to take the mantle of being like, “No, I want all this to stop. I'm going to be representing the demographic that is against this kind of populous thing of, no, we shouldn't take our men off to war anymore,” or something like that.

Because in terms of the country being on a war footing and needing to mobilise, that's still a consensus agreement. But it's in the little things where some opposition members are looking to perhaps play some politics.

Jakub: Yeah. So, let's take a step back to why we're talking about mobilisation in the first place. So, first of all, this number of half a million, let's say, what does that tell you about where Ukraine is in terms of its military situation and its strategy going forward?

Francis: So, half a million over the next year, the number in itself is pretty vague because it's difficult to predict in any ways what the dynamics will be of the war in the future.

We're talking about now we're talking about Ukraine almost certainly being in a state of strategic defence for at least the first months of 2024, and at least probably the first half of 2024, unless something drastic and unexpected happens.

And so, that differs very much from a year ago, for example, where we knew that the primary goal of the Ukrainian military was building new brigades, specifically for offensive operations.

Now at this point, we hear all the time from the military that the brigades are on demand, and that casualties, which Ukrainian units are of course suffering at different rates are not being replenished.

And when they are, unfortunately, because a lot of these brigades who have been through the thick of it are those with a lot of volunteer soldiers.

Now, unfortunately, I heard from a friend in the 47th Brigade who is fighting near Avdiivka, and their story is crazy because they were brought in volunteers to lead the counteroffensive, and after that kind of petered out, they were sent straight to the hottest part of the Avdiivka frontline to defend there.

And so, a brigade like the 47th is just ultimately going to take a lot of losses, and that needs to be replenished, but it can't be replenished by volunteers anymore.

So, those are some of the basic needs. There's replenishing units that have taken casualties. We don't know about the plans whether Ukraine wants to still create more new brigades.

So, I think the consensus is that we don't need more of those to start from scratch, but it's about maintaining at least some base level of fighting effectiveness for the brigades that are already fighting and already deployed.

And then on top of that, you have question of perhaps eventually replacing people and letting people be discharged. And so, that's another aspect where we really don't know where it could have a huge effect on this figure of how many people need to be mobilised.

Because if you operate in one paradigm where service is still indefinite until the end of the war and the end of martial law, that's one quantity of soldiers that you'll need to mobilise.

But if you operate in a different paradigm where now finally the government is getting serious about offering soldiers an end point to their service, then those people need to be replaced.

And that just causes so many headaches already for the command who is trying to maintain the fighting effectiveness of their military. But at the same time, the objective need, and I think most people would agree, the right of these people who've fought for so long defending their country to eventually be discharged is also totally legitimate.

So, we'll see with this draft law, if we reach a point where they'll agree on some kind of end date to service, and that in turn could retroactively affect the number of people that need to be mobilised.

Jakub: For the people who are serving currently, is it the most common situation that if somebody enrolled at the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, are most of those people still serving? Has there been any rotation at all for the people who signed up in February ‘22?

Francis: Unless there are some exceptions of people, I mean, perhaps they were taken prisoner and then released, or of course they were wounded and at that point they were discharged.

But there's no systemic system for someone who's been serving for that long, just to say, “Well now I'm finished, I can go home.”

Unfortunately, and that's a big grievance of the military so far because they've been like, “We've gone through so much. We went through — you have people who went through the defence of Kyiv, and then they were sent down in counteroffensives, near Kherson, and then immediately they were taken straight to Bakhmut, and then they took part in the counter offensive later.

And it's like, how much more do you expect me to give to this country?

Jakub: Going through incredibly intense battle to incredibly intense battle. I think that's the other thing is a lot of this is not sort of passive serving, sort of on the border. It's going from one hot zone to another. That sounds absolutely horrific.

So, you recently spent time with the 42nd Mechanized Brigade near Bakhmut. Can you tell us a little bit about the experiences of frontline troops and who is it that has been called up? How have they been serving? Can you give us a feel of what the situation is on the ground?

Francis: So, the 42nd was just quite an interesting brigade to work with in the sense that they're not very well known. They definitely don't have this famous brand of some of these veteran brigades or Air Assault Brigades or 3rd Assault or 47th Mechanized, which got the Leopards and Bradleys, which I talked about earlier.

They are just one of a couple of dozen kind of new brigades that were formed already within the full-scale war, just with this basic understanding that, okay, we need these new brigades to be formed from scratch with mobilised people, more or less because the volunteers, they already went, they already spread out.

And so, it was an interesting experience. They got a lot of their senior commander core from the 10th Mountain Assault Brigade who I also worked with near Bakhmut last year.

And a lot of these brigades, they have this kind of regional identity because their base is from one area and their recruitment offices in those regions are funnelling them into this or that brigade.

And so, the 47th it had almost everyone was from Western Ukraine specifically in Northwestern Ukraine. So, Volyn, Rivne, Lviv, Oblast and I had a very positive personal experience with them because they were just all simple guys who knew exactly why they were here.

They were all pretty patriotic, I guess you could say, and not overly complaining. They'd been fighting before in the Lyman Forest area, but that's already, that's like they'd been fighting for one year. So, imagine the people who've been fighting for twice that amount of time. It's potentially a little bit of a different story.

And of course, the other thing, which I can't talk enough about whenever someone asks me about the mood of the soldiers or how they're doing physically or mentally-

Jakub: I was about to ask. Yeah.

Francis: Yeah. Not only it's a huge difference what kind of unit it is, how long they've been fighting, where they've been fighting. So, have they been deployed, for example, in a very quiet area on the state border with Russia or in an area of the frontline, which isn't moving. That's a huge contingency factor on what the experience of this unit and the soldiers are in this unit.

But I think more importantly, even more kind of consequential for a given soldier's morale, how they're feeling is whether they're in infantry or whether they're doing something else.

Because if their job is infantry, if their job is an assault soldier, for example, and their job is to sit in the zero line trench for anywhere between 3 to 10 days at a time, we're talking about winter, we're talking about perhaps being sent on assault or being there tasked with defending against enemy assaults, these human wave assaults backed by huge amounts of artillery and now backed by FPV drones as well.

The amount of stories I'm hearing from infantry on the zero line who are just constantly targeted by enemy FPV drones, which can actually fly into trenches, which changes the whole dynamic of how safe you can be in that zero line.

I mean, it's just impossible to compare the experience of infantry with the experience of almost anyone else.

So, I was working with the 42nd with a mortar unit and the mortars in a way they're the smallest artillery kind of, they're very close to the infantry. They're up close and personal with the daily kind of ebb and flow of the front, but still they're about — I mean, I was with a large mortar, so they were about four kilometres back from the zero line.

And that makes a huge difference because they're not expected to assault positions. They're not expected to fight off Russian human wave assaults, and they're already out of the range of most Russian modifier and FPV drones, and they have these shifts five days at a time on the positions, then five days back in their houses.

But I was in these positions, and it was cold and they were more or less set up, they could make them really nice because they weren't being blasted to bits by artillery constantly.

So, you could stay warm, you could huddle up and it's more or less tolerable, and that's just not something you can compare to the job of the infantry. But unfortunately, it's the infantry who are in many ways, always the most needed.

Jakub: They need to be replenished the most.

Francis: Yeah. And they take the most losses. And they just have the worst time in general.

Jakub: So, let's talk a little bit about this issue of infantry and basically the question that this is one of the worst assignments that you can get, one of the most difficult, challenging, and also, this is the biggest threat to your life.

Ukraine clearly needs infantry; it has a deficit in terms of manpower. So, does Russia, and they're both trying to fill that in their own ways. What have been the suggestions there? Because essentially Ukraine is facing the question of who are we ready to sacrifice in order to ensure the survival of our society?

Francis: Yeah. So, one thing, and this is something that there's very little hard data for, unfortunately, but something that is noticed a lot by people all over within the military, within Ukraine in general.

And I really hate making comparisons to Russia, but it would also be a bit of an illusion to pretend that there's not something similar going on here, which is that there's a high proportion of people targeted for just simple mobilisation, grabbing someone and sending them to the infantry.

For example, in remote villages across Ukraine, kind of less of a lower socioeconomic level compared to metropolitan Kyiv, for example, specifically Kyiv. I mean, even Lviv and Odesa and Dnipro have reputations for recruiting officers being very active there, but Kyiv for some reason seems to be more immune to this.

And not only that, but yeah, just going after people who are potentially a little bit older. They're just more kind of blue-collar workers, for example, or agricultural workers. And it's just a strange thing to talk about because you don't want to put people into these boxes.

And again, there's no hard data from it. But people, friends of mine who come from villages in Western Ukraine say that the male population in these villages has been pretty much reduced by half or by a third, or by even more, because most of them have just been mobilised.

And there's this issue of the conscription age, there's arguments about … because now it's 27, and now they're talking about lowering it to 25, which is just a two-year difference.

But there's also this broader philosophical question about should we be taking more of the young people because they're the ones who are more physically fit.

Physical fitness is super important, especially for frontline infantry, or should we continue taking many people who are over the age of 40 or even 50. It's tricky, but these people need to come from somewhere.

Jakub: So, there's also been discussions, and I've seen this, it sounds kind of dystopian, but about essentially prioritising conscription of people who are below a certain level of income, of a certain threshold of paying taxes.

That obviously sounds quite dystopian, but it also rings true with what you're saying. And I guess the logic from the Ukrainian government standpoint is that we want to maintain the economic base. There's been other proposals about a potential lottery. Where do you see this going?

Francis: Yeah, the lottery is interesting, I guess, but also very difficult to imagine that being kind of implemented fairly in Ukraine. But yeah, what has come up more often is this economic question, the idea of specifically people paying much higher taxes and people voluntarily paying a certain fee to be exempt or to be allowed to leave the country.

But then again, there's a huge backlash against that. I mean, people do notice how awfully dystopian that kind of sounds.

Jakub: I mean, it already seems apparent from what you're saying about recruitment officers being in Drahobrat. The sort of the cheaper resort, but not in Bukovel, which is where the elites and the various celebrities and things like that go. So, it seems to already be happening on the ground, but formalising it is taking it to the next level.

Francis: Well, yeah, I mean that's the kind of paradox, isn't it? I mean, if it's already happening and it's just bad and dystopian, although there might be a rational explanation for it, but actually formalising it and making this the open rule of the country that if you have money, then you won't be sent to war. You can avoid it.

And if you don't, then you have a higher chance. I mean, that would be a step in the wrong direction. I think many people agree.

Jakub: What about the issue of draft dodging? To what extent is this a big problem both in terms of the people who are trying to avoid the draft, whether it's through bribes, fake medical records, illegal crossings? Is that a major phenomenon that we're seeing? Is it on the rise?

Francis: It's hard to exactly get a sense of the scale of it and how that could affect future mobilisation e efforts and affect discourse in society in general. But it's been a problem since the start of the full-scale war.

I remember I was in a hostel in Moldova, in summer 2022. It was just a normal tourist hostel, but there were some Ukrainian refugees, but there were also about five Ukrainian guys who had just made their way run across the border. I don't know, some paid their way, some went through across the river or something like that.

And that's the reality. It's still possible. People talk about it sometimes that there are these telegram channels that you can go to, and message and they help organise it. The price of it is consistently around 4 or 5, $6,000.

And it's still a thing. Unfortunately, a lot of people, especially if we're talking about kind of more higher socioeconomic status people, young men working in IT, they're often the ones who make this decision. Some are more ashamed of it than others, I just have personal stories there.

But again, of course I don't have the right to judge as a foreign citizen. But yeah, it's happening. And then, yeah, other people, they know friends who are just kind of hiding. They understand the risk of being handed summons in person. And again, this depends a lot on where you are in Ukraine.

So, in Kyiv, I haven't heard as much of this worry from my friends, for example, who are conscription age. And sometimes you see people in uniform walking about.

But there's not that culture of fear that has been reported on in cities like Odesa or Dnipro, let alone places more in the countryside, especially the border regions I think Zakarpattia, Bukovina, Odesa region where there is potentially more of a chance of people actually trying to get across.

And then that's where efforts to catch them, not only to catch them, but to recruit people are higher as well. Personally, I had one instance where I was approached by recruiting officers and obviously that didn't go anywhere because they had a foreign passport, but that was right on the border with Hungary, actually.

Jakub: It's interesting that you mentioned Odesa as being one of the harsher places. There was also that story last year where I believe one of the mobilisation officers had issued a lot of essentially waivers, I think for the price that you mentioned, 4 or 5, $6,000 and then bought a villa in the Spanish Coast using that.

What are the plans to address corruption that inevitably comes with increased mobilisation?

Francis: Unfortunately, there are no like clear mechanisms and also not in the draft law, where it’s like, this is what we're going to do to really clamp down on this. Everyone claims that they want to improve this and make it better.

And obviously you do have state bodies whose job it is to handle this. So, the SBU and the investigative committee and NABU, who will inevitably, if there's enough of a evidence and enough of a scandal, eventually look into something and conduct some raids and seize some property and maybe arrest some people.

But unfortunately, there's no immediate clear pathway to have a stricter approach to this.

And this issue of the recruiting officers, their corruption and their practices, this is at the centre of the social kind of issues caused by mobilisation. On one hand they have one of the most unenviable jobs in the world, I would say, filling in quotas and forcing people to go to war.

But when it comes to this dirty work, there's also a lot of dirty business behind the dirty work. And I've heard a lot of public soldiers and high-ranking officials in the military saying that a big way to improve mobilisation and to make it all happen without that social backlash would just be to have it with more respect.

Have it done, letting people, giving them time to finish their business before they go to the army to not be worried about being stuffed into a bus on the street and to not have this reputation of corruption and sometimes violent abuse in these recruiting centres. But there's no immediate roadmap of how that will be improved.

Jakub: Looking back at the coming weeks, what do you expect to see from the legislation around the mobilisation?

First of all, is it likely that we'll have a definitive version of the law anytime soon, let's say over the next month or two? And do you expect that it will become harsher or perhaps softened down a little bit?

Francis: Yeah, so when the draft law first came out, you had people from Zelenskyy’s party talking publicly about how this is about finding a compromise. And so, the big question with the draft law is like, what is the compromise between?

And that goes back to this dynamic between the military leadership, the defence ministry and Zaluzhnyi and the political leadership finding a compromise of where we can reach a point where this gives us enough tools to mobilise more people at the scale we need to, but it won't cause as much backlash for being just too harsh and too heavy handed.

And so, that's what we can see will probably be developing in the next few weeks, I think. I mean, I think there's no other option then for the country to come to an agreement about this and for that to start to be passed and to start being implemented.

We already had an announcement from this same MP, Goncharenko from Poroshenko’s party saying that it looked like the idea of being able to conscript people in this third disability group again, that's the least serious.

So, things like diabetes for example, that probably won't make it into the final, at least the first draft law that the actual Verkhovna Rada, the parliament will have a look at.

So, I think something will make it through in the next few weeks. I don't see the benefit for anyone, whether it's the politicians, the military, the country to drag this on for too long because there's already enough of a constant storm around this issue.

And I think at the end of the day, the politics is not toxic enough at this point in Ukraine where anyone is willing to really put the country's security at risk for politics.

So, this will continue at the moment where it's still in the stage where things are fanning out into different versions of the draft law and different committees looking at it and all giving their own opinion.

So, it's taking a little bit longer than maybe that some people expected, but eventually we'll start seeing that converge on some kind of consensus that can be looked at in parliament and eventually passed.

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Jakub: Alright, Francis, thank you so much for joining us on Power Lines.

Francis: Thanks Jakub. It was a pleasure. Have a good one.

Jakub: Thanks so much for listening to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World. Don't forget to subscribe and rate Power Lines wherever you get your podcast, as it really helps others find our show.

To find more podcasts like Power Lines, look up Message Heard, wherever you're listening to this podcast and find us on our website at messageheard.com or on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook by looking up at Message Heard.

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If you're interested in more in-depth analysis of the reconstruction of Ukraine, be sure to check out insights.kyivindependent.com. You can also support the Kyiv Independent through our website.

Season 2 Episode 7

Speakers: Jakub Parusinski & Lili Bivings

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Jakub: Hello and welcome back to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World, a podcast from Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent. I'm Jakub Parusinski. Each week we're going to be analysing the undercurrents of the war in Ukraine, bringing you analysis from across the globe to explain its context and consequences as the war continues.

To kick off 2024, this week we're focusing on Ukrainian businesses and the economy to discover just how resilient it has actually been and the crucial role both will be playing as the country looks forward to reconstruction in the year ahead.

Ukraine's economy was actually one of the bright spots of 2023, after a devastating impact after the full-scale invasion, the economy dropped by an astounding 30% in 2022, but last year it actually rebounded by about 5%.

As you travel around Ukraine, you will of course notice the scars that Russia's incessant bombing campaigns have left. But you will also see a vibrant and entrepreneurial economy, and not just in Kyiv, but even in the cities closer to the front lines in the eastern parts of the country.

But two years of war have taken their toll. People are tired, exhausted. Many men are serving in the armed forces. Lots of people are suffering from psychological and physical trauma.

In 2023, we saw some reconstruction projects crop up, green shoots scattered across the country. In 2024, Ukraine will want to scale that. The question is, does it have the funds, resources, people, and organisational capacity to do so?

To find out more, I sat down with our business editor here at the Kyiv independent Lili Bivings. Lili is originally from Washington DC but after serving in the Peace Corps in Ukraine from 2017 to 2020, she pursued a career in journalism covering business with us at the Kyiv Independent.

She runs a weekly roundup column, which looks at the biggest business events of the week, which you should definitely check out, as well as providing overall coverage of the economic developments in Ukraine.

Today we spoke about the startling resilience of the Ukrainian economy and the crucial role that Ukrainian entrepreneurs are going to play during the period of reconstruction ahead.

Hello, Lili, welcome to Power Lines.

Lili: Hey Jakub, thanks for having me.

Jakub: 2023 was a difficult year for Ukraine, both in the military sense, but also for ordinary Ukrainians. It was a tough year, and I don't think the story was quite the same from the business perspective. I think it was more complicated, and maybe that's actually where we can find some bright spots and reasons for optimism.

So, a lot of people would assume that the war has completely decimated Ukraine's business landscape, but actually if you go to Kyiv and some of the bigger cities, that's not really the feeling that you get. Could you give us a little bit of an outline of just how resilient the economy has been?

Lili: Yeah. Well, obviously in 2022, the first year of the full-scale invasion was devastating for Ukraine's economy. I mean, it took a 29.1% hit in GDP that year. You obviously have millions of people leaving the country. You have entire cities and towns occupied, destroyed by the war, and things really come to a standstill a lot.

And then 2023, actually, things start looking up for the economy as a lot of different sectors and industries in Ukraine actually turn out to be quite resilient. And now, by the end of this year, the IMF, the Economy Ministry in Ukraine are revising numbers of GDP growth from 1% this summer to now in November, December to 4 or 5%.

And I think most of that has to do with the fact that, I mean you have a very resilient tech sector in Ukraine, which is a large part of the economy. The agricultural sector picking up, again, there's some demining going on, but there's also liberated territories that are in Southern Ukraine that are now able to go back to farming.

You had the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which got a lot of Ukraine's grain out but then was stopped this summer. And Ukraine actually sort of puts in place miraculously its own temporary corridor. It's getting grain out that way. It's exporting through its western borders.

And yeah, the towns and cities that are either far from the front lines or Kyiv where you have really good air defence, life has been able to go on in some ways despite the fact that the war is still very much a hot war.

And so, things are kind of looking up, I would say, from a business perspective and just businesses have adapted in different ways too. You have some businesses just picking up and moving from Eastern or Southern Ukraine, entire factories and their families and their children and everything just relocating.

So yeah, I mean, I think the story of this last year, while politically it's a bit scary because they're sort of slash of political tensions and you have the counteroffensive, which largely failed, and Ukraine aid is drying up all over the world and it looks bad for the business sector in Ukraine, it's a different story actually.

Jakub: It's interesting that you mention a lot of the businesses relocating. I was kind of struck throughout the summer having visited areas especially around Ivano-Frankivsk, which is sort of in the western mountainous kind of regions, that you would have a lot of people who clearly did not vibe.

They had come from somewhere quite different bringing their families, their businesses, their assets. And I was told that there's even a sort of a boom happening in terms of constructions, lots of people building relatively swanky cottages where they can sort of just live and continue working with all around the world.

And so, you've kind of got this boom happening in the West, but you mentioned the cities and what I've been struck by is every time I come to Kyiv, the amount of sort of, I'd say just kind of raw entrepreneurship that you go into a bar or a restaurant or whatever and they've created their own sort of mini bunker in the basement so that patrons don't have to go off and exit.

You can just sort of come down if there's an air alarm, they're really building and they're adapting around the war and sort of how it's disrupting them.

I'm curious, is it a similar vibe if you go to some of the other big cities that are more in the centre and east of the country? I'm thinking about Dnipro, Odesa, Kharkiv. To what extent is that similar mechanism sort of playing out?

Lili: I think it's very much playing out in those places as well. I mean, you have different dynamics going on everywhere. I mean, Kharkiv has obviously been extremely affected and it still continues to be extremely affected by Russian bombardment.

And I know a lot of companies have moved out of Kharkiv and into Kyiv, especially tech companies, you have a lot of tech companies who are relocated from Kharkiv to Kyiv.

But I've heard the same things, in Kharkiv you have this vibe anyway, this kind of, okay, we can't go on like we usually would, but let's put the cafe or the event or the bar in a basement, in a bunker and let's just keep doing what we've been doing.

I mean, that's what Ukrainians always kind of do though. They always just trying to figure it out. They're very scrappy in that way.

But yeah, I mean, and then it depends, something that has also been really remarkable about Ukraine over the last year is that more people have opened up what are called FOPs in Ukraine, which are kind of these individual entrepreneur registrations to open up small and medium sized businesses and you have record numbers of people opening up these new registrations.

What it means is that people are starting their own businesses. And this is happening not just in Kyiv, not just in Western Ukraine, this is happening in places like Kremenchuk, Poltava Oblast where I used to live, in Mykolaiv, in Kharkiv Oblast.

And this is largely because, well, people have lost their jobs, so they figure, alright, I'll just do something on my own. I'll start my own business. It's very easy to open one up in Ukraine and start selling things online.

So, that's another really interesting dynamic in some of these cities that have been more affected, where jobs are lost, people have left, factories are either destroyed or closed. Ukrainians have found this other way.

Jakub: Yeah. That's really interesting. And this actually reminds me of a piece in The Economist a couple of years back where they were comparing American versus European business cultures. And the whole cliche, I mean, it's there for reasons.

Americans are go-getters, risk takers. They're ready to sort of try new things. And then Europeans are super cautious and they're waiting until the whole space is sort of regulated.

And then kind of the article pulls in sort of the post-Soviet space. And I think, Ukraine is as good as an example of that, as you can imagine. And they kind of say like, if you thought that this was on some kind of continuum, you couldn't be more wrong.

It's like, take the difference between the Europeans and the Americans and go another sort of similar distance into sort of like risk-taking and being able to … for post-Soviet entrepreneurs, America is a peaceful, well-regulated gentle society.

They are used to much more tough environments, much more chaotic environments. And that's an energy that you can just really feel. And I mean, it would be really fantastic if Europe could benefit from it because that could be a real driver.

Lili: Yeah. I mean I think you see it playing out even in the support for Ukraine. Americans are just super supportive of Ukraine. And it's partly because maybe there's some historical stuff with Russia always being our eternal adversary. I say our, because I'm American, our eternal adversary.

But I think it's also that there's these ideas of individualism and freedom that are playing out here that really speak to Americans. I mean, you have entire towns in the state of Maine in the U.S. with Ukrainian flags all over them. There's not a Ukrainian person in the town or within miles of this town, and it's just, there's a vibe and there's a spirit.

And Europe is much more cautious towards Ukraine. They're a little more suspicious of Ukraine. They're not so sure. And you see it even playing out in investments too, like where do investors venture capital funds go to get money for Ukrainian startups? They go to the U.S., they go to California.

When they go and talk to Europeans, the Europeans are like, I don't know, there's a war there. And those Ukrainians, they've got issues with corruption, and I don't know. So, these dynamics and stereotypes I guess are real.

Jakub: No, they're definitely based on something. Before we sort of go into some of the challenges that Ukrainian businesses are running up against, what is your sense of sort of what's happening in the defence tech, MilTech space?

Of course, this has been very loud in terms of headlines. There's been a lot of news about, first of all, how the war itself has been a shift technologically in the role of drones and so forth.

But also, the industry that sort of follows that, all of these robotics, aeronautics, automated guidance systems for drones. There's a lot happening there. At least when we look at the headlines. How's it feel, let's say on the ground?

Lili: Yeah. So, I mean, I think, weapons production and military tech in Ukraine, I mean, it's game changing for sure. And I think actually this excites the Americans too, because of course you realise that this is perfect, experimental stuff going on, on the ground in real time.

The European defence industry is also interested, but this interesting dynamic is also playing out where they're like, okay, we want to invest in Ukraine's defence industry because it's beneficial for us. We can make money.

But not too much that then they become too competitive. And then they knock us out, right?

Jakub: Yeah.

Lili: And so, you have, it's like this caution, same with the military aid to Ukraine. And it's because they understand that what's going on in Ukraine right now in terms of military tech is probably revolutionary.

I mean, at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, you had like nine different types of drones being produced in Ukraine, something like that. And now you have 200 reconnaissance and combat drones that are being made by Ukrainian tech companies, military tech companies. And that's just drones.

There's tons of other types of military equipment. There's also cybersecurity. But all of this stuff right now is just exploding in Ukraine. And lots of people want a piece of the pie.

Obviously, the big companies also want to use it to get information and experience. But definitely there's an anxiety that what happens if Ukraine becomes the powerhouse of the defence industry in Europe?

But it's also like politically, okay, Ukraine is our friend now, what if in 30, 50 years it's not, and now they are the second army in the world with incredible military technology.

So, I imagine too, there's some people who think, okay, what if this stuff ends up in the wrong hands, not just in Ukraine. But in general.

Jakub: No, you're right that there's a lot of energy and there's a lot of people who see this as the next generation, the frontier in terms of what's coming. I mean, personally, I've to my surprise, run into people like the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt in Kyiv cafes just having meetings with all of the different executives that he's brought on board. And you can feel this sort of buzz and excitement.

The other thing which is a little bit worrying here, I guess from a Ukrainian perspective, is people specifically because Europe needs people and Ukraine has in a way been a boon especially for Poland and Germany, let's be honest, in terms of moving a lot of working age people out of there, mostly women with children, which does represent the cost, but the benefit is very quick and very direct.

And so, one thing that I've heard a bit from Polish entrepreneurs is well, I mean investing in Ukraine, maybe, maybe not, but we certainly would be happy to get Ukrainians over here to work in our companies.

And I think that kind of brings up two challenges, which is one, how does Ukraine deal with that? And two is how do you maintain — a lot of Ukraine's advantages come from an abundance of skilled labour. How do you manage an economy when that labour is no longer as skilled or as abundant?

Lili: Yeah. I mean, I think it's not openly talked about, but Ukrainian refugees are an extremely highly skilled workforce. And the Germans and the Poles are probably not going to want to just give that up so easily in terms of creating incentives for Ukrainians to return. They're just not.

And so, it's really a challenge to imagine how do you actually then help Ukraine's economy when all of these people have left and these countries want to incentivize them to actually stay.

I know that some investors, they do this thing where they invest in Ukrainian startups or tech companies. They don't necessarily have to be based in Ukraine anymore.

So, they have a Ukrainian founder, or they have Ukrainian staff and they're considered a Ukrainian company because they're a Ukrainian born, as a way of kind of still investing in Ukraine, even though you're not doing it inside of the country, or the company isn't based here.

So, I think there's also ways of kind of still trying to invest in Ukraine and in Ukraine's future with people who have left with the hope that maybe they'll employ people here or that there is a chance they would come back in the future.

But yeah, it's really frightening that these people won't come back. And I think the European countries, the line is kind of like, oh, well these families have now put roots down in these countries. Their children are starting to grow up there. It's not going to be so easy to leave. But no one wants to say that actually these countries don't want them to leave.

Jakub: Yeah. So, one thing that has come up is so many millions of people have left Ukraine, whether the number is, I think 7, 8, 9 million tends to be the sort of range that people mention.

And a lot of them want to come back. A lot of them have already put down roots, as you say. And it seems increasingly clear that Ukraine as a nation will have to think about itself a little bit differently than the classical nation.

And in some ways, maybe more similar to Israel where you have a very large diaspora, you have a process of return and keeping roots with the country. Something like the Aliyah, that you come back, and you somehow get refreshed.

And that is, I think, an interesting and probably an inevitable part of the solution of how does Ukraine think about itself going forward with this large diaspora abroad.

The thing that has me a little worried is you look at a lot of the places where Ukrainians have relocated, whether it's the Nordics, Western Europe, Canada, the U.S., these are countries that have high labour costs, but they also have very high levels of knowledge and productivity.

And with all the respect that I know this is not a popular thing to say, a lot of the Ukrainians, they coming from a market that just didn't have those demands, was a different environment, different things were demanded of them. It's hard to see how they can compete in a lot of these places.

So, I'm kind of looking at how is Ukrainian productivity looking in terms of the labour? Is it going to be competitive?

Lili: So, on productivity, there's sort of two things going on. I think there's the first, which is that just the war has really made people's ability to focus and get a good night's sleep more difficult.

So, you already have, right now, you have this difficulty with productivity because people either are kept up all night because of air raid sirens, or they're stressed, or they have lost family members, or they have family members fighting on the front lines.

And so, it's just impossible to be as productive as you normally would. And the Economy Ministry has even tried to implement this program of like helping with an app to help people be more productive at work because they realise that, I mean, if the Economy Ministry is collaborating with a tech company to put on an app to improve productivity at work, it understands that there's a problem with productivity in society.

And that in order for the country to really move forward, people are going to have to be more productive. What that means is people are going to have to work harder, be more focused.

Jakub: Yeah. And just for our listeners, you're referring here to the BetterMe app. They are not sponsoring this episode, although we're happy to take a call and talk about it, but that's really something. They have clearly recognized that this is an issue.

Lili: And so, I think it's some sectors, the other thing that's happening is that there's just a lack of proper training on how to be really productive and produce well in your sector.

So, let's just take the tech sector. One thing that startups struggle with in Ukraine is just knowing how to be an attractive startup to potential investors from the most simple things of storytelling, just telling your story and having a nice elevator pitch.

And that's something that requires training, to the entire kind of professional appearance of that tech startup, which is really important for investors as well. There's some sort of lack of gaps in knowledge there in Ukraine.

And of course, there are accelerators and things that try to educate tech startups on this, but I think this is happening in every sector. You just have a lack of like experience. I mean, Ukraine is a young country.

Jakub: Yeah, definitely.

Lili: And you have people who have left, sort of some of them maybe the more experienced or better people or more successful people live elsewhere. And so, they're not here to pass down or share that knowledge.

I mean, really Ukraine is going to have to channel, I think actually it's diaspora to contribute that way. To sort of show the way forward for businesses, for tech companies, for how to even kind of structure a workplace, things like this that we're already something really in process, in progress in Ukraine because it's a young country and it's coming from a Soviet, or in some people's minds a kind of post-colonial place where they're already behind.

And now you have this war, which has just made everything way worse. But yeah, I think what it really is it's going to be people showing and teaching and training other people on what productivity in different sectors looks like.

Jakub: Yeah. So, I think that's a really interesting observation. And it really does align with what I've seen that a lot of the time you might find people who know how to code, but not necessarily how to pitch.

And there is this kind of gap when it comes to the type of skills that are very prevalent, especially in the anglosphere about debate and communications and sales and all of, that is probably one of the areas where Ukraine tends to do not so well.

But yes, it does have a huge diaspora. I'm almost wondering if there isn't a space where … it's a big country, there's a lot of damaged infrastructure, but there's a lot of people who really want to do well.

And a lot of the conversations that I've had with Ukrainians who work in various sort of, I'd say quite successful corporates and things like that globally, they really want to get involved. And they're talking about how can you scale that through educational technology, how can you do mentoring?

And I don't think anyone's quite cracked this, but if there is a place where really that kind of upskilling can happen at scale, I mean Ukraine is well poised to do that.

Lili: Yeah. I just wanted to add, it's a really good point, what you made about Ukrainians being really good at coding for example but having less experience or knowledge about how to then sell that thing that they're really good at.

And that's the thing, Ukrainians are super talented. They have so much to offer and it's just about the packaging almost and the communication.

Jakub: The project management as well.

Lili: Right, right. Exactly. And I know that project management is a big one for reconstruction because I know there's a lot of foreigners who are interested in through grants and other sources of funding, just organising training programs. Especially for urban planners and architects and on the project management part specifically, how do you go from point A to point B?

You might be an incredible architect, have amazing plans, you're well known in the community, you have the resources to do the project, but not necessarily carry it out.

And so, I think yeah, there's a big need for that in Ukraine, which it's always been something really curious to me because like we’re talking about, Ukrainians have so many talents and they're so skilled at so many things and this gap, which you think shouldn't matter that much somehow actually really hurts them when they're trying to compete with other countries or other companies.

Jakub: Being Polish, I mean, I feel safe enough to say that Poles and Ukrainians are kind of the antithesis of each other in many ways. Ukrainians are incredibly skilled at communications, I think, and at presentation, at design and things like that, which is an area where I think as Poles, we probably might be amongst the worst performers in Europe.

And when you look at a lot of the businesses that have been set up, they tend to be very process heavy, onerous kind of, integrating themselves into the German economy and Ukraine is not at all that.

Ukraine has been a very sort of different kind of business environment. And so, yeah, coming from sort of Poland or from a western European perspective, it's a little bit shocking to see just so much talent, so much raw potential resources and so forth. And then there is trouble with implementation and that's pretty consistent.

Lili: I think it's getting it started in Ukraine, people are really good at starting businesses and I think they have a hard time competing with the well-structured, well-organised Western businesses.

And I think this probably comes from a place of Ukrainians in general, like I said at the beginning of our conversation, are very scrappy. So, and they've been living in this kind of survival mode for a long time. I mean since-

Jakub: For 30 years now, if not longer.

Lili: Right. And so, when they start a business, it's kind of just, they just go for it. They just do it and it's all a little bit on the fly, which is a great thing, because that's definitely a cultural thing, which means that people are ready to just throw themselves into something. And just do it. Which is on the one hand an amazing part of their culture.

But on the other, if then, in the sort of implementation of a structure that's highly organised, things are a little bit different. There's less experience doing that. There's a lot of experience doing things on the fly in survival mode, less experience with the long-term planning because Ukrainians haven't had long-term thinking in their business and even in their personal lives.

Jakub: Turning to the reconstruction, which is sort of I think something that at this point has become quite loaded and it's almost the expectation can't live up to the hype that's been built up over two years.

But also at the same time, it is a huge opportunity for Ukraine, not just in terms of rebuilding its infrastructure. Obviously, there's that in terms of anchoring the country in the West, obviously that's it as well.

But it's also a chance for European and American and international, from all over the world companies to work in Ukraine with Ukrainians and to share a lot of skills and knowhow. There's a huge opportunity to also sort of build skills. How is that going?

Lili: Well, I think, like you said, there's a lot of hype about reconstruction. It feels a little bit like the hype around the counteroffensive. And there was this big thing just right around the corner where all of the foreign businesses and countries, embassies were going to come in and just radically reshape the country's infrastructure and both critical infrastructure and road infrastructure and social infrastructure.

Jakub: And you can't live up to that hype.

Lili: First of all, you can't live up to that. Second, the war is still a hot war. And foreigners and Ukrainians, people who might invest in these things understand perfectly well that tomorrow the thing they build could get hit by a missile.

And yes, they're implementing things like war insurance right now, they're trying to bring more money in for this. But at the end of the day, if a missile hits your factory and kills also the people that you employ, if you're a serious investor, you obviously are taking these things very close to heart. You're not just dismissing them.

So, there's that. And then like we've been talking about, I mean, you have people who have left. So, you just have a less populated country to rebuild. You have a lot of people fighting on front lines, then you don't have as much necessarily expertise in project management of implementing different reconstruction projects.

Then you also have people who are not interested in things changing. What I mean to say is that they're corrupt and they don't want this sort of modern Western European style construction projects that are done using sustainable materials and things like that, because that's not the quick and easy and cheap way to do things.

So, there's a lot in the way, but there are things happening. And things are being rebuilt. It's just slower than one would hope.

Jakub: I mean, one thing that I think is really important to underscore and I think you made that point quite clearly is that, well first of all, this isn't Groundhog Day. This isn't sort of one day we see an investor that's not scared of his or her shadow and all of a sudden, we proclaim that reconstruction is open.

I'm not quite sure if I'm using Groundhog Day correctly. This is my sort of having watched a couple of Bill Murray movies.

Lili: Yeah. I think Groundhog is when the same thing happens over and over again.

Jakub: Okay, alright. Fair enough. Well, it's the day when that rodent sort of comes out and basically doesn't get scared of its shadow and you say, okay, this is the end of winter.

Well, that's not how reconstruction works. It's a slow process. There's companies that are coming in and they're sort of gradually kind of building each other up. There's a dynamic that needs to be built.

I think one thing that's interesting to see is who are the actors at the moment? Because one of the beliefs is that obviously the private sector in the end will be the one that is sort of driving the process, but I don't think we're quite there yet, right?

Lili: No, I think it's mostly still institutional money. So, international financial institutions EBRD, IFC obviously as well, the embassies countries themselves. Providing loans and grants to both Ukraine and to Ukrainian companies, but also to their own companies.

Because private companies are still waiting a bit. Because we've heard you and I, there's no premium for being early. There's no premium for a private company to get here now as opposed to five years from now when things are maybe peaceful and there's no war.

And I think some businesses feel differently. They think, no, you should come now. You should start rebuilding now. You should help Ukraine but also be the first ones in.

Jakub: Can we just unpick that, because I think that's a really important point is there's no premium for being early. One thing that, in discussions with various investors and business people, and please tell me if I'm wrong, but basically there isn't really a discount for buying Ukrainian assets at the moment.

There isn't really a discount that you can get things cheaper, if anything, because of the war. Some things have become more expensive. That's kind of shocking because you'd expect it to be the other way around.

Lili: Right. I think people assume it's cheaper because it's Ukraine and Ukraine is cheaper because It's a poorer country. So, investing in here would be less, but actually no, I mean insurance, you have to have some sort of war insurance, which is only provided right now through kind of institutional financing. So, not everyone can get it.

And then you usually have to bring people here from wherever, you need to make sure they're protected. There's a lot of security risks and security measures that if you're like an embassy or a private company from that country that you need to now take care of for these employees.

And then of course there's just like this risk over your head the whole time that something terrible might happen. And I think too, there's anxiety not only because of the war, and people don't love talking about this, but because of the Ukrainian government, because right now under martial law, the Ukrainian government can nationalise anything it wants essentially.

Jakub: Of course. I mean that makes sense in a way, but it doesn't make you nervous.

Lili: I mean, it makes you Ukrainian business people nervous too. Even Russian assets are just being taken over by the state, which makes sense, right?

Jakub: Of course. Yeah.

Lili: And I've even actually heard Ukrainian businessmen though, great Ukrainian businessmen who are totally above board saying like, “What are they going to do with those assets?” They're worried about kind of the transparency over how these assets are going to be resold or privatised rather.

And so, I think just overall, I think yes, most westerners who are interested in investing in Ukraine, support Ukraine recognize that the issues that exist in Ukraine do not define all Ukrainians or all business transactions in Ukraine.

But they're not totally unaware that the risks come from both the war and also the internal situation and the judiciary in Ukraine, whether or not it's a hundred percent true what everyone says about it being totally corrupt, there are arguments on both sides.

The fact of the matter is that there's this reputation that Ukraine has an unreliable judiciary system. So, if you're a foreign business, you won't necessarily be protected if there's any issues. That's the fear. It's not necessarily that it's true.

So yeah, I mean there's just a lot of things right now that are standing in Ukraine's way, unfortunately, of reconstruction really starting in earnest. And again, the hype around it is only going to create disappointment when it's not like this sort of paradise on the other side that we arrive at, which we're never going to because that's also just not how development works. You don't just flip a switch.

Jakub: No, it's a process and it's gradual. One additional question about the reconstruction, which I think is worth mentioning is just do we have a vision of what kind of country we're rebuilding? And what I mean by that is there is a lot of discussion about build back better. Of course, that sounds fantastic.

But what does better mean? Ukraine in the past has been actually a very socialised country. You'd be surprised even by European standards, the quality of the various social goods may not have been great, but they were widely available, whether we're talking about hospitals, pensions, protection of workers' rights, if you were officially employed, the amount of holidays.

And that's probably not the vision that a lot of the international funds, especially the American ones are having that when they're coming in to rebuild a country after the war. And so, is there a sense of sense how people are thinking about the economic model of Ukraine going forward?

Lili: It's such a good question because it's actually not part of the wider public debate. And it definitely should be. You don't hear this conversation of wait, wait, wait, hold on. Are we like rebuilding a neoliberal paradise in the western model? Or are we rebuilding the country we want to rebuild? Are we not?

But I don't think people have the bandwidth to pay attention to what economic model. Even though it actually makes perfect sense, because if you aren't careful how your country gets rebuilt and by whom and with what money and by whose standards, your country can end up looking a lot like you don't want it to.

And I think yes, that is something we should start talking about more in Ukraine. But I think people are more worried about just bringing the money in and getting it done and getting things rebuilt and giving people homes and new schools and new hospitals.

The other thing too, I mean, think about all the towns and villages that have been completely destroyed. And a choice is going to have to be made over which of those to rebuild. And a lot of these villages, officials in Ukraine have said, well, why would we rebuild that village, for what?

And you realise that okay, not only is that devastating to hear said because that's where people's lives were, and homes were. But also, if you want this to be a successful agricultural powerhouse, you will need to actually promote and help develop small and medium sized farmers.

To do that you need to create lives for these people in rural areas where they actually have … there's a civic life there, there's modern homes, there's good schools.

We're talking a lot about Green New Deal in smart cities and tech hubs and things like this. And it's like, but wait, wait, wait, wait, most of the country is agricultural and we shouldn't just sort of write that off as something that's part of the past or something where like grandma lives.

Jakub: Well, I was going to say, especially if you want to keep the younger generation in some of these places, you need to make sure that they're connected to the world, sort of people can see themselves building their lives there. So, I think that's a really important perspective.

Speaking of perspective, we've got 2024 coming up now. In terms of the year to come. What is it that you expect to see and what is it that you would like to see for Ukraine?

Lili: What I hope to see in 2024 are a lot more small-scale local reconstruction projects that are happening both between Ukrainians and foreign partners, small foreign companies that do local reconstruction projects.

So, you have that sharing of expertise happening and experience, but also local communities are getting rebuilt in sustainable ways, but also ways that give people a reason to stay or return or be excited about where they live.

I mean, you're not going to get everyone to come back, but you can at least make the people who still live in these places that have been heavily damaged feel like there's a reason for them to stay.

We talk a lot about attracting people back, but there are still millions of people here. And if you can convince them that there's actually a really bright future here, even in a local small community or a city far from Kyiv, I think that has a huge impact as well.

So yeah, I just hope that there's more of this kind of collaboration between Ukrainians, Europeans, Americans, Japanese, South Koreans on how do we build a country and what that could look like and making steps to actually do that.

I think there's a lot of potential, and it's starting, there's some cool things happening, but there's the space for a lot more.

And I think with next year too, if more air defence comes to more cities and things calm down parts of the country, like they have, continue to calm down in parts of the country, like they have more foreigners will come.

Even now in Kyiv last weekend I was walking around, I heard more English and foreign languages than I have in a very long time. So, foreigners are starting to come back, which means that there's interest in Ukraine. And I hope more of that happens.

Jakub: A lot of small and mid-sized successes. I think that's a great wish for Ukraine. Not just the bright headlines, but really something that meaningfully changes the country. And then of course, one huge, gigantic military success on the front lines.

But yeah, I think that's a really great wish for the country. Lili, thank you so much for joining us on Power Lines in what has been one of the more optimistic, I would say, despite its challenges episodes of the series. Thank you.

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Lili: Thanks for having me.

Jakub: Thanks so much for listening to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World. And thanks to Lili for all of her insights. Be sure to check out her brilliant reporting on our website.

Don't forget to subscribe and rate Power Lines wherever you get your podcast, as it really helps others find our show.

To find more podcasts like Power Lines look up, Message Heard, wherever you're listening to this podcast. And find us on our website at messageheard.com or on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook by looking up at Message Heard.

You can also follow the Kyiv Independent on Twitter and Facebook at Kyiv Independent and Instagram at kyivindependent_official to get the latest news and stay up to date with our coverage.

If you're interested in more in-depth analysis of the reconstruction of Ukraine, be sure to check out insights.kyivindependent.com. You can also support the Kyiv Independent through our website.

Season 2 Episode 6

Speakers: Jakub Parusinski & Mykola Davydiuk

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Jakub: Hello and welcome back to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World, a podcast from Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent. I'm Jakub Parusinski. Each week we're going to be analysing the undercurrents of the war in Ukraine, bringing you analysis from across the globe to explain its context and consequences as the war continues.

This week, as 2023 draws to a close, we want to take a look at how Ukrainians are holding up, especially given the political turbulence of the last few months, both internally and internationally.

2023 was a difficult year for Ukraine. A lot of people expected that after the Kharkiv and Kherson counteroffensives, a whole host of Ukrainian successes would follow. But it actually turned out the other way around.

The counteroffensive was difficult, it stalled. And meanwhile, Western support, which had been so united at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, has started to fritter away at the edges.

There have been positives to be sure, especially in the Black Sea, where Ukraine has pushed back the Russian Navy. It has retained Odesa as a port hub, and it's even managed to unilaterally open a grain corridor. And the economy has rebounded.

Ukraine continues to function as a nation, as a society, as a country, but it hasn't been easy. Internally, the country has also changed, where once what we saw was an extremely united front, now politics is back in the conversation. We see that Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the Head of the Armed Forces, has quite a different view on where Ukraine is militarily and what the path should be looking forward, than its President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Several politicians have thrown their hat in the ring saying that they want to replace Zelenskyy as president, and we see criticism, which was once unthinkable, showing up in social media on YouTube and on Telegram channels.

But what does the Ukrainian public actually want? They're obviously tired, exhausted by this gruelling fight, but are they ready to stay the course? Do they perhaps want a change in leadership, new ideas and new ways to move forward in order to bring the country closer to victory?

To hear some more about Ukraine's current political situation, I wanted to speak to someone with an insider's view. So, I got in touch with Mykola Davydiuk. Mykola is an author and a popular political scientist in Ukraine. He's advised many major political figures over the past decade and is now a key commentator on the war through his YouTube and TikTok channels.

I asked him about how he's experienced 2023 politically in Ukraine, and what he thinks are the likely next moves for Zelenskyy, his allies, and his rivals.

[Music Playing]

So, we are here today on Power Lines with Mykola Davydiuk. Mykola, welcome.

Mykola: Hi, thank you for invitation.

Jakub: One of the first images that came out of Ukraine at the beginning of the full-scale invasion was this video by Volodymyr Zelenskyy with the prime minister, his chief of staff, his head of party, and all of these other key figures around him.

And the text of that was that we are all here. He was showing the unity. He was showing that he had not left Kyiv, that he would defend the country. And this was a really huge signal that Ukraine is united against the Russian enemy and people rallied around him. The world rallied around him.

Fast forward almost two years, it feels like we're in a bit of a different place. You've got people coming out and announcing their candidature for president. The international scene looks a little bit more grim. It's more difficult to make decisions.

But also, within Ukraine, it feels like the mood has changed. And the first question I wanted to ask you, has politics come back to Ukraine?

Mykola: Just start to answer your question, I think we're still altogether here, but when the West concentrated on figure of Zelenskyy and compared that with the Churchill, Ukrainians stayed strong, and they concentrated on the state.

And the West tried to see just the one hero with whom is easy to shake his hand, and with whom you may make a selfie, with whom you may talk, you may invite him to your parliament, to your office. And I think West concentrated just in one person.

And when appeared, many other heroes, many other volunteers and the top generals, many commentators started to talk, “Oh, no, they split it, they're frustrating, and that is like political competition.”

But I'm not sure about that. Yes, I see some drama and scandals among Zelenskyy, and some other people. And when politicians started to attack and defend their political field and their ratings, personal ratings.

But if we are talking about institution or when we are talking about institution, the role of institution is more important than the names of the person who may sit on the top or who may rule that institution.

And if you're talking about Ukraine, we need to mention that we are like a truly democratic society. And some media started to talk about conflict and among politician generals.

But yes, sometimes politicians try to defend their field and trying to pressure in some militaries and trying to restrict some zero possibilities. But I don't think that is a big scandal or a big drama for us.

And they're like militaries doing their job silently and just don't care what the politician doing. They're just doing their job. And the result we can see on the monitor, 300,000 killed occupants or like that is their result.

So yes, we may feel that we started to speak more, that we behave more in political side, but I don't think that Ukrainian political life truly back on the stage, we don't have election. We don't have many media which we had before, and we're still mobilised on the war, I think.

Jakub: I think what you say about the Western media's portrayal of the war is a very fair challenge. They were lost, I think, completely lost at the beginning of the full-scale invasion. It was so terrifying and overwhelming, and they tried to find a narrative for it.

And Zelenskyy as the superhero, the Churchill of our times, personifying the war via Zelenskyy himself is something that leads you off track.

And the second thing that leads you off track is this kind of ebb and flow of the narratives. A year ago, Ukraine was a superpower and Russia was two feet tall and everybody thought that the Kharkiv counteroffensive and the Kherson counteroffensive would just be repeated endlessly until Ukraine got to the Russian borders.

Now it feels like the table has turned by 180 degrees and everything seems a little bit desperate that there is no hope at the end of the tunnel. And almost certainly the narrative is bouncing too far from one side to the other.

But that being said, I think there's also a question about, well, you've got the piece by Zaluzhnyi in the Economist, and you've got sort of the daily messages which have now come out for 650 days or even more from Zelenskyy.

And these seem at odds and regarding the strategy, regarding the way sort of forward. And I'm wondering, is this sort of one of the things that is driving what appears at least to be a certain level of conflict or discontent?

Mykola: If we are following that narrative about Churchill, so I think maybe the goal just entered the room and then like a real military and then like, and Churchill started to feel a little bit uncomfortable.

You mentioned that Zelenskyy didn't leave Ukraine, but in the same time when he had the space to call the presidents to unite the world and unite Ukrainians sitting in his shelter, somebody fight on the same time.

And I'm talking not about just the Zaluzhnyi, but about Ukrainian armed forces that the guys whom we forget creating narratives, because not just the politician organised that first days.

So, I think Zaluzhnyi and his people and they are the biggest heroes in this world, but not the politicians. But what I mentioned in the start when we are talking about institution is much better in strategic way to keep institution that there some names.

I think the ratings is the worst tool to measure your effectivity in there or to measure how excellent you are during the war is like is quite stupid issue to use a poll. But that is a unique reason why the politicians and Zelenskyy started to … the answer is a poll.

So yeah, but I think they need to forget about the polls during this war until the end. And the next day we will take polls and then we will start to talk. But during the war is very harmful to the nation and to the state.

Jakub: Just for our listeners, what you're referring to is sort of several polls I think that have come out not quite publicly, but people have sort of seen or heard about them over the last sort of 18 months that shows that sort of trust in and support for the Valerii Zaluzhnyi has kind of grown and is high and in some cases exceeds Zelenskyy, and others.

It sort of challenges them. And I think that's a fair point to sort of call out that there's something more important.

Turning maybe over to other politicians than the ones in the presidential administration, what do you make of the positions of Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, who has not just most recently, but sort of made various kind of efforts to stand out and potentially position himself for some kind of elections.

Poroshenko, the former president. Arestovych, the I guess former now advisor to Zelenskyy who has officially announced his candidacy. What do you make of those figures that have in some way or other sort of tried to bring up the issue of who's in power, how do you run the country, et cetera?

Mykola: I think like during the war, we are talking about the candidates, but the worst issue for the candidate that we are not expect an election. Yes, we talk about that during the mid of autumn and we talk and expect maybe for spring and but now the situation on the battlefield is not so good. And nobody guarantee you that you may organise that election.

About the candidates, I think everybody of them of course want to be a president of a young democratic state and during the war is like very respectful and they give you a lot of possibilities.

You may meet with all the presidents in the world, but I'm not sure that the state has enough muscles and the power to survive in both processes. The first one is election. The second is a war.

So, how to keep and save the state during the war and election, we don't know. And that when we're talking about election looks rather as experiment on the state and on the democracy, because what the Lindsey Graham said, you need to prove that you are a super democracy.

But I studied political science and I know that in political theory and political practice, we don't have such words as a super democracy. We just have a democracy. You are democratic or not.

And we can't compare Ukraine with Russia because like some European politicians said, if Russia organize election, they are democratic. And if you are not, you are not democratic anymore.

But Russia don't organise election during 20 years. The process that mass, which they called election, that's not an election that how Episcopal said, that just a bureaucracy.

So, we can't be compared with the Russia who is truly autocratic. And we can't also show that we are super democracy because somebody won that, in our constitution black and whites written that we are forbidden to organise election during the war. That was what was written by founding fathers of our state and our constitution. And they thought about that.

So, I think now we need to concentrate more in looking for weapons and the money and the political diplomatic support in the West and Global South, but not trying to understand which candidate is better.

Of course, we have a lot of candidates, we are a democratic statement but some of them not working for Ukraine like Arestovych who like criticising all the time states … in Poland and just working as a popular activist and a blogger with very tough pro-Russian narratives and defending Russian language, defending many Russian issues here.

And about Klitschko, he's a mayor and he is responsible for the biggest city in the country and that is not everything good with the city, with the comfort of life and so on and so on. And we know that he's thinking about election, but he's just 1% rating guy.

But his speeches in foreign media in Western and like Germany and Swiss media as he's like 95% person and which is not true.

And also, many bloggers and the singers and comedians want to be, but we have one big problem. We may win all the elections, but we may lose a state. And that is the biggest threat and the danger that too much people thinking about election, but not so many people thinking how to survive during this war.

I mean personally, and I mean the state. Yeah, a lot of candidates is a good mark that we are democratic, but that is not a good mark that we so hard concentrated on a battlefield.

Jakub: I think that's fair. One sort of quick question here is, given that the narrative has been quite unified coming out of Ukraine to the world for so long, basically what we're seeing is this a case where anybody who comes out challenging that narrative gets a disproportionately large platform.

And basically, this is an opportunity. Anyone who sort of wants to be heard and seen, well, you have an opportunity to do that now just because the voices that were coming out of Kyiv or other parts of the country were so, I guess consistent.

Mykola: I think we just started to dig deeper and before we just read the headlines and then now the people started to read all the articles about Ukraine. I think situation is the same.

And maybe some voices is louder and yeah, that may happen. But if you're talking about the narrative, is we are united, yes, we are as a society and political class, including the top generals more united than the West are.

Or we may also compare with the Russian society. Do they really so united supporting the war as they was in February, 2022? No. And the question about our unity is the answer, do we survive in the evening when we wake up in the morning? And if we are not united, if we are not together, if we are not fighting, we have no chance to survive.

So, the unity in the is the answer of our surviving. So, that's also important to mention that Ukraine trying to resolve many, many different questions including Russian church, which are the network of Russian KGB spies.

We are trying to resolve a question of language of reforming a government and the political society. We're trying to reform economy, we're trying to look for money, we are trying to look for like political diplomatic support.

In the same time when our house is burning, we are still fighting against second world, biggest army. So, we're trying to resolve so many questions.

I also met a lot of people who are supporting Ukrainian language, who are supporting Ukrainian state, but the same time they support Russian church and such voices also quite loud.

And we need to speak more, but we also don't have possibilities to speak about the church in the time when we are fighting against Russian troops. So yes, some voices truly allowed, but that is a explanation that we are doing so much job.

Jakub: It's a very difficult, there's so many different challenges that Ukraine needs to address. One of the questions that keeps popping up, and it feels like that's something that's also changing a bit in Ukraine is the question of to what extent should Ukraine have a offensive strategy in 2024?

People talk about a peace plan, but that seems completely impossible. And correct me if I'm wrong, because Russia doesn't want peace, Russia doesn't respect peace. Any document that would be signed would have no value.

But there is a question of trying to contain the fighting to limit it and to get more time for training for additional weapons to sort of bring down the intensity of the war.

How do you feel that that has evolved in Ukraine and how do you feel that also specifically, I'm wondering is there a difference in between how Zelenskyy sees this and how Zaluzhnyi sees this? Because it feels like there's a little bit of a different perspective on that.

Mykola: Yeah, I think perspective of well-trained military and the young politician is different. And that's not bad. We're speaking about different views and the different ideas how to win and how to save the state and how to save our future and more people.

And that what happened with the counteroffensive when Zaluzhnyi tried to save more lives and more weapons when he understood that not all the NATO tactics is working here and that not everything is working against Russia.

I think that is a question not of public discussion. And that is like some talks amongst politician and top generals, Ukrainian and NATO generals, and that is a question about strategy and how to win-win now or tomorrow.

But if the answer tomorrow we need also to have a strong proposition for Ukraine for today. Because when somebody started to speak like what Wall Street Journal mentioned in 2025 you will have better position on the battlefield.

Yes, maybe, but how to survive until that time? Yes, maybe in 2035, we also will have excellent position, but how to come to that point and nobody may explain and if we reject some support in 2024, expecting for better 2025 that they will not come.

I think that's also like a big formula and how much weapons we may receive, how much money we may receive, how many people do we have? Because strategically, I more than convinced that Biden right, that he's right. If Ukraine lose strategically West also lose.

And I think that's not just the fight Ukraine against Russia or Russia against Ukraine. That is a big, huge battle in this century among democracies against autocracies.

The same among Hamas and Israel, the same China against their neighbours. Then I'm not only one island which are a state, but also many other neighbours, the same North Korea against the South Korea and many, many others.

So, we are living in a big world battle democracies against autocracies. And if we not supporting the players of our team, how we think that we may win, we lose Ukraine, we'll lose another state, we lose one more state and then we will start to scream what's going on. We are losing the game.

And I think that is a big mark who will win in this war, Ukraine, or Russia, and that will create a trend globally. Who will win in this century? First — Ukraine must win what Biden said, and as I know they thinking about a precedent and which have to teach the dictators of future don't do like Putin.

I think that wasn't enough to finish the story with Iraq, which wasn't a nuclear state. That was a good mark for many different dictators. Not to invade in weak and smaller neighbours, actually what happened with Kuwait.

But I think they need also to show an example what may happen with the dictators who has a nuclear weapon. The West need to show that they know how to behave with such kind of dictators. And that will be an answer for this century.

And the Biden who is very experienced guy and he is very old school politician, and he knows a lot of dictators personally and he knows how to behave with them. So, like I believe that he will show the old-fashioned political leadership and show that democracy also may be strong.

Jakub: So, there's a couple of points to unpick here. I think it is important to recognize that the war between Russia and Ukraine is one that fans out across the world.

And when Russia goes unpunished, other people may take the initiative and see like, hey, I can do what I want as long as nobody can stop me. And I think it's fair to say that Russia is encouraging this kind of behaviour wherever it can, the Middle East.

Most recently it looks like in Latin America with Venezuela and Guyana, there is also a conflict brewing and Azerbaijan and Armenia by the way as well. A sign that, if you cannot be stopped by force, then you might as well move and do what you want as long as you have the power to do so.

Part of that story is that Russia has already switched to a war footing. They have already moved towards a war economy. The West hasn't and is struggling, and Russia unfortunately it seems like it's holding up better than expected, at least at this point in time. Although it's difficult to see what is happening under the surface.

One of the things that Russia is doing is trying to use different influence operations both within Ukraine and internationally.

Maybe to start with Ukraine first, what do you see that Russia is doing that in order to try to undermine Ukraine politically, internally, morally? Is it still active there as it has been for many years? Or how do you see that?

Mykola: I think Russia trying to spread out the chaos in the world. They are very irresponsible people and their politician not thinking about the world. What may happen with the nuclear weapon, with the climate change, with border controls and they are not building something.

They are too weak to build something. They try to build the like left-wing world, if you remember to build a communism. And they couldn't and they tried to build Russian empire and they couldn't. And they understood that their strong side is not building their strong side, is destroying.

So, what they are doing now, what they are trying to promote is a chaos, chaos everywhere. And they build in not strong pro-Russian narrative. They just build in anti-Western narrative, and they try and to provoke Global South and many other countries and they're like, “Let's fight against U.S., let's fight against West.”

But in the same time, what Surkov wrote in his article that Russia want to be a part of Global West and they want to be like a Global North. So, they also afraid to fight against China because they know that China much stronger than Russia. And they lost their chance to be stronger after 1991 and after 2022 when they lost strategically their war in Ukraine.

I think Russia just trying to spread out the chaos. And their game is weak because Russia is post empire, is like dying empire and who has very strong sentiment of past, but don't have a strong vision of future.

And comparing Russia with Soviet Union, Soviet Union had ideology that was like communism, socialism, and the left-wing ideas. And they worked with that in Africa and Latin America and Asia and many, many others in part of the world.

But Russia don't have such idea. Is it right or is it left? They support or are they against? You don't know. And if you compare their messages in different parts of the world is like in U.S., they supporting Trump in Africa, they are against Trump, and in Latin America depend on the state.

So, they are state without position. They just spread in chaos. In Ukraine, choose their side. We say like we are a western state, we want to be part of that. We want to be part of EU, we want to be part of NATO. And if we are talking about new wars which may happen this or next year, Guyana and happen Israel, yes, we see that Russia involved.

Jakub: Okay, but just to sort of bring it back to Ukraine, so what is it specifically that Russia is kind of pushing on? What are the levers that it's using, you mentioned the church, what else is its strategy vis-a-vis Ukraine.

Mykola: Yeah. Language split and also mass. And like they try and to blow out our mobilisation and they try and to separate politician, they try and to spread out their propaganda.

For instance, yesterday I wrote a blog on my YouTube and just show how Zelenskyy moved to Argentina, how he met with Milei. And that was just the general stuff, nothing special, but a hundred and thousand comments on my YouTube page.

And they're like, they write in that he come to take drugs, that he's like an old fascist and in 40s came to Argentina because he want to disappear. I think that all the people is like Russian bots and trolls.

So, they also trying to work with such narratives against Ukrainian officials, about Zaluzhnyi, about Zelenskyy, about many other Ukrainian leaders. So, I think that church and language is a key and also fighting against mobilisation is top three and …

Because they can't promote Russian party or pro-Russian party because they strike missile firstly in Kharkiv, and Chernihiv and also their troops entered Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Kherson which was very pro-Russian regions and now they are not.

So, what they still have is trying to split. So, I think these top three is real work. And they invested there a lot of money and resources and the people.

Jakub: Turning towards the next year, I think it's fair to say that Ukraine has gone through a ton of misery and difficulties, not even just since February 2022, but the 10 years before that of war against Russia.

But 2023 seems to have been particularly difficult. How do you see 2024? What are the reasons for optimism? What are the things that maybe the narrative has discounted too much and there are certainly are a lot of them, I think Ukraine's victories in the Black Sea have been overlooked certainly. But how do you see the coming year?

Mykola: The next year will depend from two issues. First, will we receive money from U.S? And how the Congress may vote, that I think crucial.

Second is like a long run in Ukrainian case is like the results of American election. A lot of things depend from the world leader. And I think that is the most. We may do our home task and our home stuff and like mobilisation and producing of Ukrainian weapon and also like Ukrainian taxes and everything is possible is not like impossible for us.

But the most important is a superpower stays in Washington. So, results of election and the money, I think everything depend on that.

Jakub: Is there a plan B either with the money or with the election of Trump? I mean to name the elephant in the room.

Mykola: That's depend and about money we also need to talk more even now about sanctions against Russian money. Sovereign money and the money of oligarchs. We didn't receive any cent from that.

And we see half a trillion bucks in Europe and in U.S., but we still need to ask money and some donations and in Europe or U.S., but I think we may pay for land lease by Russian money which are frozen in Europe. So, that may be a good plan B.

But that is like a frank speaking among politicians. And I'm not sure that European mates and the partners are ready to start that conversation. Many of them still believe that they will or would cooperate with Russia and Russian money.

So, you need to choose. And so, yes, that may be a good plan B because they had like a billion and billion dollars is for a hundred billion dollars only in Europe. So, that's a good amount of money, which may help Ukraine to win because what Ukrainian general top general said and in Ukraine’s … that to win we need from 350 millions for 400 billions.

And so, that is enough Russian money to win. So, we don't need to begging money from European taxpayers, American taxpayer, just let us to use frozen Russian money.

Jakub: Okay. What about internally? I think we started this conversation by saying that the media has relied too much on trying to build a narrative around the war, but narrative matters. And it does matter what message you send internally, what message you send to the world.

What would be your recommendations in terms of how Zelenskyy and his team and his institutions can shape the narrative going forward?

Mykola: I think we need to speak more with the Global South and the world, not only the West, because Russia spreading their propaganda, and we need to help to keep Western leadership in the world and do that globally. And this war must not be like a West against Russia or Russia against West. We need to unite all the world.

So, our narratives have to be different in different parts of the world. We can be the same state everywhere because we are also different and we are post-colonial state, which were occupied by Russia for 400 years.

So, with Africa or Latin America, it's easy to speak because we feel their pain and we know what they mean and we need to show them our history also occupied colonised state, and they sometimes closer to us than to Russia, because Russia send them a message. It will just be anti-American, just be anti-Western. And when we come and show them that we are like so close, and we may be like a good team.

So, we need to speak more in Latin America, Africa, Asia. Also, we need to invest more in media and in a narrative about grain, because we supported two years under the war. We providing a fantastic grain to Africa, but nobody appreciate that.

It is like everybody think that is a Russian grain, or when Russia stole a hundred thousand tons of Ukrainian grain in Kherson and then move that to Africa and said that that is a donation from Russian people to African people. That was crazy because the grain was from Ukraine and GRC and in BBC wrote about that. That is horrible.

So, we need to work more in diplomat political and media field and just to show ourselves, and I think my message to invite more people to Ukraine mostly like the top political leaders as Pope Francis and Lula.

If before we invited a lot of the people who support Ukraine, now we also need to invite the people who arguing against us, even Mr. Orban. We know how hungry he's and how he trying to serve Putin, but we need to find his humanity and we need to show him what his friend did in Ukraine, truly did in Ukraine.

The situation very similar, what was among some left political elites in Europe who supported strongly Soviet Union. But when some of them saw what happened in Solovki, in Gulag, they stopped to support that.

So, we also need to show the Gulag and Solovki what happened here and now in Ukraine. So, and I think we will change their mind and maybe even their mindset.

Jakub: Perfect. I think that's a great thought to end the year on and hopefully it'll be one where Ukraine will have an easier path to maintain its independence and secure all of its territories. Mykola, thank you so much for joining us on Power Lines.

[Music Playing]

Mykola: Thank you for invitation. Thank you so much.

Jakub: Thank you so much for listening to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World and thanks too to Mykola for coming on. We'll be back in the new year with an episode looking forward to 2024 and the role that business and the economy will be playing in the reconstruction of Ukraine.

The whole team at Power Lines and the Kyiv Independent wishes all of our listeners, a safe and restful holiday season. Don't forget to subscribe and rate Power Lines wherever you get your podcast, as it really helps others find our show.

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Season 2 Episode 5

Speakers: Jakub Parusinski & Justyna Gotkowska

[Music Playing]

Jakub: Hello and welcome back to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World, a podcast from Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent. I'm Jakub Parusinski. Each week we're going to be analysing the undercurrents of the war in Ukraine, bringing you analysis from across the globe to explain its context and consequences as the war continues.

This week, we're turning our gaze from east to west to look at the evolving nature of Western support for Ukraine, from the U.S. to Germany and beyond.

Ukraine's ability to resist Russia has been unexpected and awesome to watch, and it relies a lot on the bravery of Ukrainian soldiers. But beyond that, western support has been absolutely critical to Ukraine's war effort.

Over the course of the war, we've seen an evolution in the types of weapons that Ukraine is asking for. A year ago, it was long range missiles called HIMARS. Now it's F-16s, American fighter jets.

We constantly come back to this idea of a Wunderwaffe, a wonder weapon that through its superiority can settle the outcome of the war. That idea is even present in the article that General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the head of Ukraine's Armed Forces, wrote for the Economist. He talked about technological progress as the way to overcome a stalemate and potential defeat.

But what was once a relatively unanimous support coming from the West is becoming more fractured. You have especially far right voices clamouring for lower levels of support for Ukraine or outright halting it.

And the voices that are asking for a peace deal with Russia are getting louder, whether real or imagined. In Ukraine, there is a growing fear that Western partners will put pressure on the country to settle with Russia to do a peace deal that will not actually provide security and stability, but will only allow Russia to re-equip, re-arm and attack again.

To discover more about these issues, we invited Justyna Gotkowska onto the show. Justyna is the Deputy Director at the Centre for Eastern Studies in Poland, known as OSW and Head of the Security and Defence Department.

It's those last two subjects that she focuses on, primarily looking at central and Eastern Europe, as well as Germany and the Baltic states.

Her work at OSW since the start of the full-scale invasion has been really fascinating and insightful. So, we were thrilled to have her on to learn some more about just how important Western support for Ukraine is and how it's been changing over the past two years.

[Music Playing]

Justyna, welcome to Power Lines.

Justyna: Thank you for the invitation.

Jakub: Today we're talking about the evolving nature of Western support for Ukraine, and your work at OSW focuses on European and NATO security policy, especially on Europe’s eastern flank. So, has the prospect of a Russian invasion always been a threat, or is that something that appeared since 2014?

Justyna: I think that Russia has been perceived as a threat for Poland since 2014, and the annexation of Crimea, invasion in Donbas. And already then Poland started to seriously think through its security and defence policy.

Raise the budget, modernise the armed forces. But definitely 24th of February 2022 has been a last wake up call for the political elites, and especially for the society that the war can be very close to Poland and can also influence Poland directly.

And Russia can stage an aggression against a NATO Eastern flank country, if not in a couple of months, then in a couple of years. So, the fear at the start of the Russian invasion against Ukraine 2022 was real.

Then I think the situation calmed down with the Russian being not successful against Ukraine on the front.

But I think with the current situation, people start to worry that if the front will be freezed or if the Russia may be successful in Ukraine, militarily or politically sooner or later Russia, depending on the international environment, Russia may also start some aggressive operations against NATO countries on the Eastern flank.

Jakub: I think Russia has shown that it is an aggressive actor. It's a actor that does not respect the rules-based order, let's say, what other states would consider typical red lines. That's something that it wouldn't stop Russia decision making.

And as you mentioned, if it manages to “swallow” or deal with Ukraine, then it will look further west. Let's come back to that in a second. But one thing that the European states, especially the states on the Eastern flank, have done as part of their defence policy, is provide a lot of support to Ukraine to make sure that Ukraine is where Russia is stopped. How significant has the support been?

Justyna: Well, I think that if we consider the current situation, Ukraine is to a very large extent dependent on Western support of ammunition, spare parts, military equipment, and other types of weapons. And without Western support, we are risking that Russia may break the frontline in Ukraine.

So, Western support for Ukraine is crucial for Ukraine not only to win this war, if so decided by the decision makers in Washington and Berlin, but maintain the frontline.

From Kyiv's perspective, Ukraine really depends on, on the decisions and political situation in Washington and Berlin and Germany, France, and especially Western Europe since the Eastern flank countries have given so much weapons away to Ukraine during the first year of war that it will be difficult for them.

And it is difficult for them now to provide Ukraine with more meaningful amounts of military equipment for its offensive operations. Of course, there are still deliveries of spare parts, ammunition, and some military equipment from the Eastern flank countries.

But this is in comparable with the situation in the first year of war where when the deliveries from Poland, from Czech Republic, Slovakia, Baltic states really helped Ukraine to survive and to fight back.

Jakub: I think it's worth underscoring for our audience just how drastic those decisions by Eastern European governments were, especially in the early months of the war. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it felt like a lot of the countries on the Eastern flank essentially emptied their stockpiles in a matter of months or certainly within the first year.

I mean, we have stories of sort of Poland leaving airplanes in the forest on the border with Ukraine without officially sort of moving them across. I think that's an important thing for our audience to realise.

A lot of the support has sort of come into falling into one or of two categories. There is what seems like the more mundane, more high in terms of scale, kind of basic equipment, artillery shells, armoured vehicles, the things that are a little bit less glitzy and glamorous that don't necessarily grab the headlines.

And then we have lots of different high-tech weaponry and that weaponry has evolved during the course of the war. Initially it was HIMARS, Abrams tanks, leopards, now ATACMS. F-16s.

What's sort of been more important, or how have these two played out? If you agree with this kind of dichotomy at all? Because it feels like there's two different things happening here. The Wunderwaffe and then the thing that Ukraine actually needs on a daily basis.

Justyna: Well, I think that Ukraine needs different kinds of equipment and weapons, so you cannot really say that one is more important than the other. So, with regard to the land forces, here I think the effort and the deliveries coming from the Eastern flank were crucial, especially in the first year of war, as I said.

Because they allowed Ukraine to refill the equipment that was lost to strengthen the capabilities, especially with regard to armoured heavy capabilities. Poland delivered Ukraine more than 350 tanks, that's a lot, more than 200 armoured personal carriers, more than 70 modern howitzers.

So, this equipment in the first months of war came, especially from the Eastern flank countries, former Warsaw Pact members who still had in stocks equipment that Ukraine and this other version used.

And this was very helpful because Ukrainian soldiers were quick to adapt them, not to operate this equipment and didn't need that much time for training.

We see this right now with the western heavy land equipment that we need to train Ukrainian soldiers on using this equipment in Europe. And simply delivering the equipment to the Ukrainians is not sufficient.

But not only land equipment matters, defence matters, and we see Germany concentrating, especially on them, defence systems providing Ukraine with modern weapons.

So, we have also the discussion right now about delivering Ukraine airplanes, fighter jets like F-16s that will take time. We have discussion about delivering the long-range missiles and these weapons are equally crucial because they allow to strike the backyard of the frontline and Russian occupied territories or in Russia and are crucial for Ukraine to diminish the ability of Russian forces to strike against Ukrainian military.

Jakub: How would you characterise the current state of the war? We've had the word stalemate thrown around a lot. I think maybe a bit incorrectly because the fighting is ongoing and it's quite intense, but certainly, we have Zaluzhnyi talking about positional war. The frontline is not moving.

What is the current situation in your view, and what's the kind of western support that is needed at this moment? 

Justyna: Yes. We have a kind of positional war. We have allowed Russia to fortify its positions we have delivered too late and too little for Ukraine to be able to regain more of its territory last year.

And I think these are the consequences of, in part, the failed western strategy, which was based on fear of escalation and use of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia in Ukraine.

So, the deliveries, Western deliveries of military equipment for Ukraine came a bit late for Ukraine to use them on the battlefield, and therefore allowed Russia to gain time to fortify the positions, which makes right now very difficult as we see for Ukraine to break the front.

But at the same time, I would not call it a frozen front, no. And a stalemate, because all depends on us, on the West and on the quality and quantity of ammunition and military equipment we will be able to provide Ukraine in the coming weeks and months because I do believe that Ukrainians at this time are still able to make progress and conduct successful operations.

So, the combination of ammunition delivery, new types of equipment, equipment to deal with the minefields that have been set up by Russia is needed. And this is a concerted effort, combined effort of different kinds of equipment that Ukraine needs now at this moment and will need in the coming months.

And I think this is right now put under question due to political developments in the West.

Jakub: So, I was about to ask you last time we had this period of preparing for the counter offensive. It was also a question of delivering various arms from the West of preparing soldiers, preparing plans.

Now again, we have this situation where it's a different combination of weapons and probably the plans are better, and you can see that people recognize the importance of training and so forth.

But if political will failed there, how are we doing now and what is sort of the big roadblock?

Justyna: The big roadblock is the political situation, especially in the U.S. and the difficulties to push through the Congress, the next financial package that will finance or shall finance the military support for Ukraine, financial support, and humanitarian support for Ukraine.

This is over a hundred billion U.S. dollars’ worth package combined with support also to Israel and to securing the U.S. south and border. And due to the situation in the House of Representatives, there are problems to adopt it in the Congress.

And the situation is politically difficult, and I think people in Washington right now don't really know how this story will end when and if and in what amount this financial package for Ukraine will be adopted.

So, there is no guarantee whether Ukraine can count and in what timeframe further military support from the U.S. and now the work is ongoing on resolving the situation in the Congress and adopting the financial package and making the support for Ukraine being granted for the coming months until the next U.S. presidential elections.

And apart from the situation in the U.S. we have a difficult situation in Europe, as I was talking about, the Eastern flank and limited possibilities for military deliveries for Ukraine, but also Western Europe, in my opinion, has not treated this war and Russian aggression seriously enough.

The arms industry production has not been sufficiently and quickly enough. We have problems with arms production that is too slow in Europe to make up for the possibly delayed or decreased U.S. deliveries. So, I think that we are facing very difficult weeks and months to come due to political problems in the West.

Jakub: Let's sort of get back to Europe in a second, but just sort of staying on the U.S., can you give us a bit of a sense of a timeframe? America famously gets wobbly when it comes to political decision making towards the end of the year. Frequently there are budget crises, there's a lot of other deal making that happens that gets in the way of sort of making clear and quick and efficient decisions.

What happens if we say have several months rather than several weeks of delay on this process?

Justyna: Well, since Ukraine depends on military deliveries from the West, and the U.S. provides the biggest bulk of these deliveries both with regard to ammunition and other equipment. And Europe will not be fully able to produce and deliver more equipment, more ammunition for Ukraine instead of the U.S. Ukraine might face a very difficult situation on the frontline.

Russian forces may break the frontline and Russian offensive might prefer to be successful. And we might face the situation with Russian forces advancing simply. And I hope the situation will not materialise.

I hope that the U.S. Congress will resolve the situation, but I'm not sure about the timeframe, and I'm not sure about the scope of the financial support that will be granted for Ukraine.

And Europe will face a challenge and situation to find a solution to the situation. Otherwise, we'll have a very fluid situation on the front with Ukrainian forces having difficulties with maintaining the frontline as it is now.

Jakub: There's a thing that I wanted to get back to that you mentioned, which is that the support package was raised initially in convergence with the package of support for Israel.

Now we're already quite some time over a month into the Israeli Gaza war. And perhaps I'm mistaken, but it does not seem like U.S. aid to Israel is something that would move the needle. I understand that they want it, and they need it, but the U.S. aid is not an existential issue for Israel right now. Or perhaps you see this differently. To what extent is this a threat for Ukraine?

Justyna: Well, I think this is not existential for Israel, but this is very political for the U.S. and as I understand the politics in Washington, this is an additional argument for the Republicans that might be questioning the help for Ukraine to adopt the package.

And therefore, the White House does not want to split it, would like to adopt a whole package, meaning financial help, support for Ukraine together with support for Israel and support for securing the southern border because it fears that it might be very difficult to push through the Congress and especially through the House of Representative support package for Ukraine only.

So, I think this is political tactics on part of the White House to have a combined package Ukraine, Israel, and the border. And it's not really so important for Israel to get additional military support from the U.S.

Jakub: Coming back to Europe now, we've had Geert Wilders that the far-right populist from the Netherlands coming out as the largest winner of the Dutch parliamentary elections, though that does not mean that he will be able to form a coalition. That's a different story.

There are risks in other parts of Europe. To what extent is that a threat, especially given the fact that Ukraine already has a enemy within the European Union, which is Hungary, which is clearly blocking any sort of support.

Orban gets emboldened when he has a “partner in crime,” to block deals with and veto deals with. Is that something that should be keeping Ukrainians up at night over the coming year?

Justyna: Of course, and I think this is the consequence of the strategy devised by Washington and Berlin batting on long-term or longer support for Ukraine or on Ukraine not winning quickly over Russia.

And we are faced with right now a need of long-term support, military support, financial support for Ukraine, which is difficult for European, Western European societies to bur.

And then in a situation where we have economic difficulties, when we have a migration crisis coming to Europe, again, not from the Ukrainian side, but from the Middle East, from Africa, we have right-wing parties coming into power, right-wing parties that are less supportive of Ukraine or would like to stop block or diminish the amount of Western help that goes to Kyiv.

So, we will have more and more problems within the Western camp in supporting Ukraine on many levels. So, the longer war serves Russia more than the West is more beneficial for Russia.

But we need in the West to understand the situation we are in, the stakes of this war and try to maintain, at least maintain if not increased support for Ukraine. And that will be increasingly difficult.

And 2024 will be a crucial year, in my opinion, for Ukraine because of the U.S. presidential elections of the turmoil, political turmoil that we are entering in the EU. And the question will be how much support Ukraine will get and hands whether it'll be able to maintain itself vis-a-vis Russia as it is doing now.

Jakub: So, you recently spent some time in Germany looking at how the situation is there. How, how does Berlin see this?

Justyna: I think that the discussion in Germany is very multifaceted. If you read the German newspapers, if you listen to German security and defence experts, they share the analyses and the recommendations on Western strategy that we have in Warsaw or across the Eastern flank.

So, Russia needs to lose this war. We need to maintain and increase our military support for Ukraine as quickly as possible. We need to deliver Ukraine a new quality of weapons.

We need to invite Ukraine to NATO in order to show Russia that the gamers basically strategically over, and that Russia will not be able to extend its sphere of influence over Ukraine also in the future.

And we need to open the accession talks with Ukraine in order to provide the country with a positive future perspective of the EU membership and a perspective for building the country in general.

But I think if you analyse the decisions of the German chancellery, chancellor Scholz and his advisors, I think that the outlook from up there is a bit different. I think that still the strategy that is largely shaped by the chancellery is governed and guided very much by the fear of escalation on part of Russia by Russia using tactical nuclear weapons.

It's guided by not understanding what is at stake, by thinking that Russia will be satisfied with a part of Ukraine, that we can have some peace negotiations and a solution that will allow Russia to occupy parts of Ukraine and that will allow the rest of Ukraine to become a sovereign country.

And then we can think about NATO membership and or EU membership. So, from the perspective of the German chancellery, as I see it, there can be a modus vivendi, a way to find a solution for shaping Eastern European security and European security in general with Russia.

And I think this is a very different analysis that we have here on Eastern flank, where we see Russia as an aggressive actor that wants to challenge the European security architecture and order, and that wants demise of the EU and demise of NATO and wants to extend its sphere of influence, not only over Ukraine, but also over parts of central and northern Europe.

I think that here we have a strategic difference and therefore we have strategically different responses and answer to this war. And these differences are then being shown in discussions within NATO, for example, on NATO's membership of Ukraine.

Jakub: You mentioned something that is a very specific phrase that Germany does not want Russia to win. That's not quite the same thing as wanting Ukraine to win. Is that a reflection of the nuance that the German chancellery is taking, and does that translate into perhaps the kind of support that it is ready to give the level of engagement?

Justyna: Definitely, you have this phrase and this narrative coming from the chancellery. You mention it, Ukraine cannot lose this war, and Russia cannot win that. And still the chancellery sticks to this narrative which is widely criticised by the German public, by the German media and the German experts because it does not state very clearly that Ukraine needs to win this war and Russia needs to lose it.

And there is a difference in meaning, which is translated in the German strategy shaped by the chancellery. If we say that Ukraine cannot lose this war, we don't say Ukraine needs to win this war, we don't provide Ukraine with weapons that will allow Ukraine to win this war.

And therefore, you have this debate that's now is a months long debate about delivering terrorists long range missiles to Ukraine by Germany. That would put under question, for example, the Russian occupation of Crimea.

Germany does not want to do that, or the chancellery does not want to do that because it fears first escalation and second things that after all, we will need to find a solution, and the peace deal with Russia and this peace deal with Russia will be that Ukraine will have to give up maybe not only Crimea and Donbas, but parts of southeastern Ukraine to Russia for peace.

And I think, and I shared this analysis also with German expert, that this is a thinking and an analysis based on hopes based on illusions, that Russia may be an actor that we can deal with, that we can satisfy with some concessions.

I think this narrative, and this analysis question here on the Eastern flank very much, and even if Russia would be willing to go for such a peace deal, that would be tactics only that would discourage Russia from attempts to subordinate the all of Ukraine and to start renewed war after some time in the future.

Jakub: Yes, the vision is very much that Russia would use a peace deal to potentially just regroup, rebuild its logistics lines and then come back for more.

The fact that Germany or that Berlin perhaps has this appetite for peace talks or this readiness to believe in peace talks to come in on good faith, that's certainly something that carries weight. Even if it perhaps doesn't sway the other Western partners, no doubt it's, it has impact.

What do you think that means in terms of the shape of the peace talks? I mean, even in Ukraine there is a … I would say nobody is really talking about potential peace talks, but there is a growing appetite for de-escalation or containment of the fighting because it has taken a very brutal toll on so many people's families at this point.

And so, there starts to be a sense that, look, if we can get to some kind of deal where we do have a accelerated path to NATO, I think that's something that would make sense and is different from just a peace talk that is essentially a ceasefire for a couple of months or a couple of years and then we go back to fighting. To what extent is that something that's realistic?

Justyna: I don't think it's realistic due to several factors. The first one is there will be no NATO invitation and no NATO membership in such a situation because Germany, and I think the U.S. treat this option as a bargaining chip in future possible peace negotiations with Russia.

And I don't believe that in such negotiations, Russia would be willing to agree that it gets parts of Ukraine, Crimea, Donbas, Southeastern Ukraine, and the rest of Ukraine can join NATO and can join the EU.

This is not what Russia wants. Russia wants to subordinate the whole of Ukraine. Russia wants to go beyond that, and this is not the Russian goal.

So, therefore I think, think that this talk about peace negotiations is a bit illusional because from the Russian perspective, I'm not sure when Moscow observes what is happening right now in the west, in the U.S., in Western Europe, the difficulties with the continuation of military deliveries to Ukraine, the political turmoil both in the U.S. and in Germany, for example, starting the right-wing parties coming to power.

I don't see the incentive that Russia has for any real peace negotiations. If it enters such negotiations, that might be a very short pause and the war, and I think Russia would put really high expectations in such peace negotiations.

So, that would be tactical, and I really doubt that we would achieve a meaningful peace agreement with Russia that will provides the Ukraine in its current shape, security, and then the prospects for joining NATO and for joining the EU.

I think both Washington and Berlin are very cautious about NATO involvement in Ukraine and NATO's membership for Ukraine even in such a scenario.

Jakub: So, what could a piece negotiation just look like in practice? I mean, we're talking about a deal — well, first of all, it's probably not a signed deal because I can't imagine Zelenskyy coming and signing such an agreement after the political commitment and the personal commitment that he has made to victory.

So, it's most likely something that would be unsigned, perhaps signed by other parties’ security guarantees, which Ukraine had security guarantees before 2014 and before 2022.

So, it's curious how you could make them more tangible and then sort of closed or hidden clauses regarding the fact that there will be no NATO membership, even if that's something that isn't said out loud.

I'm sorry, I'm just thinking out loud. But is this sort of the format that is being imagined?

Justyna: Well, I don't believe in such a peace deal, first of all, so this is the first point.

Jakub: Neither do I, to be clear.

Justyna: Yeah. The second point is that I really doubt that Ukraine is politically ready for any talks on this. I don't think Russia is ready on her talks on a peace deal. If Russia will take up this idea that would be only a tactical instrument to influence the West.

And I think also the White House, I talked about Berlin that it sees as a possible scenario and a scenario that could materialise in this year, but I don't think that Washington thinks in the same way, or at least in Washington, you have different voices, different opinions, and I think the one that still prevails is one about the long war and they need to prepare for it.

The problem is the U.S. Congress and the situation in the House of Representatives and the problems with the new adoption of the new financial package for Ukraine, which influences the U.S. calculations, and which may be in some circles, therefore think that an attempt to forge or to make a deal with Russia could be worth trying.

Jakub: I mean, I'm not going to ask about the EU accession because that's something that I think in Ukraine, people do not realise just how much of an unmovable bureaucratic process that is. There are no shortcuts through EU bureaucracy.

I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see that this is something that can be accelerated. So, that also means that essentially the Western partners don't really have that much to offer in terms of positives for Ukraine. There is only the question of ensuring support or the lack of.

Justyna: Well, that's true. The accession talks between Ukraine and the EU will be difficult. I hope they will start at all. I think that the EU has to discuss also … I'm not sure whether within the EU, there is a clear vision on the accession of Ukraine and possibly other countries. Whether we stick to old procedures or whether we think about a new approach to enlargement policy.

I think that right now we focus very much on this traditional way of EU accession. But I think with the process being stalled or being delayed either by the unpreparedness within the EU or unwillingness of some countries to start this process or due to unpreparedness of Ukraine to enter and to go through this process, we might end up with discussions on some kind of stage accession, phased-in accession.

We are not yet there, but I can imagine scenarios where these discussions might come back.

Jakub: Final question. Do you think that if support ended, would Ukraine continue to fight? Does it have any alternatives?

Justyna: Ukraine, as it is dependent on weapons, munition, equipment from the West, in my opinion, it might face a defeat in this war, if the support from the West will stop.

I hope such a scenario will not materialise, but we might face a decrease of Western support to Ukraine, which will be equal difficult for Ukraine, but maybe the Ukrainians will be able to manage the situation.

Jakub: I mean the one thing that I will say is that based on what you're saying, it kind of looks like the strategy that Vladimir Putin took on, not initially, but several months into the war, which is essentially that look, as long as we keep up the level of aggression and just wait it out, we're more patient than the West.

Yes, they are united now, but their resolve is fickle. It can turn into sand; it can fall apart quite quickly. While that actually seems to have been somewhat correct, that is the weak part, the weak spot at least.

Justyna: Yes, Russia is betting on that, but at the same time, Russia is weak itself. Russia has problems to maintain this war. Russia have problems with ammunition, stockpiles with equipment. Russia will have economic problems due to sanctions. And in the long run, I think that we as the West are stronger than Russia.

I think we need to keep and maintain the support for Ukraine. And we need to understand that Russia, after all, is a weaker actor betting on us that we, due to democratic procedures, will stop the military support and other support for Ukraine earlier than Moscow.

But overall, I do believe that Ukraine, with the help of the West, can win this war in the long run. But the West needs to be united, needs to understand what is at stake, needs to maintain the support for Kyiv.

And in my opinion, in such a situation, there are good chances that we will wait out Russia since Russia is the weaker actor, but for that political will is needed. And I think this political will is currently lacking both in Western Europe and partly in the U.S. And this is the problem.

Jakub: Well, if history is any guide, Russia breaks very, very slowly and then all at once. So, let's hope that that happens sooner rather than later.

Justyna Gotkowska, thank you so much for talking to us on Power Lines today. It's been really fascinating. Thank you once again.

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Justyna: Thank you for having me.

Jakub: Thanks so much for listening to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World. And a big thank you also to Justyna for coming on.

We'll be back in two weeks when we'll be looking at the domestic scene in Ukraine, exploring the political tensions in Kyiv as we draw towards the end of the year.

Don't forget to subscribe and rate Power Lines wherever you get your podcasts, as it really helps others find our show. To find more podcasts like Power Lines look up, Message Heard, wherever you're listening to this podcast, and find us on our website, messageheard.com or on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook by looking up at Message Heard.

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Season 2 Episode 4

Speakers: Jakub Parusinski & Sam Greene

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Jakub: Hello and welcome back to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World, a podcast from Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent. I'm Jakub Parusinski. Each week we're going to be analysing the undercurrents of the war in Ukraine, bringing you analysis from across the globe to explain its context and consequences as the war continues.

And this week we're getting into the head of Ukraine's enemy, the force who has been occupying vast waves of Ukraine's territory since 2014. And whose disastrous invasion is the reason this podcast exists in the first place. I'm talking about Russia.

Russia has always been confusing for the West. In fact, it's now something of a cliche to call Russia an enigma, a mystery, to talk about the Russian soul. But what is clear is that for decades, if not centuries, Western analysts have struggled to properly analyse and understand Russia.

Why that is, is a complex question. There's issues of data. Russia is not the most transparent of places. There's also reasons that are more tied to where Russia is and where Russians are as a country and as individuals.

The U.S., Western Europe, while potentially declining, are still great powers and thriving countries. Russia has been on the decline for a long time now, and many individuals there are only looking to solve their own problems rather than those of society at large.

That changes the way a country works. And more recently, Russia is realising that its place on the global table is no longer secured. And as a player who's about to lose everything, well it's in its interest to turn the tables upside down.

And the way that Russia has been doing that is by attacking the geo-economic order in various ways. For example, payments, it struggles to get transfers in and out. It doesn't like Swift; it doesn't like Visa or MasterCard.

And for years it's been trying to build up its own system called Mir. Russia has sought to foment and increase global instability simply because it does not benefit from the current system. It feels like it is losing, and it is trying to break things apart.

Russia has found partners around the world that agree with its vision to a lesser or greater extent, China is one of them, but many African, Asian, and Latin American countries, especially the more authoritarian ones, also want to reverse the rules-based order and the American hegemony that follows.

While Russia might not have the capability to open new fronts all across the world, it does certainly encourage them, it benefits from the conflict between Israel and Gaza from instability across Africa, and potentially it would benefit from conflict in the South China Sea.

The West is currently feeling overwhelmed by all of this, but trying to create instability can be a dangerous game. Russia has recently seen that happen in its own regions.

So, is it really happy about what is happening in the world? Where does the road ahead lead us? To find out more, I got in touch with one of the West's leading analysts on Russia, Sam Greene.

Sam is the Director for Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis, as well as a professor of Russian politics at King's College London, where he founded and directed the King's Russia Institute for 10 years.

He spent plenty of time living and working in Moscow in the past and has written a number of seminal books on the country, including Putin versus the People from 2019. It's definitely worth a read if you haven't already.

I got in touch with Sam from his base in Washington to see if he could help us find out what is motivating the Russian government, how they're benefiting from global instability, and whether Putin will be in the position and interested to end this catastrophic war anytime soon.

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Sam, welcome to Power Lines.

Sam: Thank you. Great to be here.

Jakub: You've been studying Russia in various capacities for a long time now. Can you tell us a little bit about what you are currently focusing on and how you have seen your studies change since February 2022?

Sam: That's a big, big question. And I think that most of us who've been studying Russia, at least if we are studying it, not just from an academic perspective, but from a policy perspective, are having to ask ourselves and have been for the last 20 months or so, having to ask ourselves a lot of very difficult questions.

There are things that we misunderstood or that we got wrong. There are things that I think have challenged the assumptions that a lot of us had and maybe continue to have about how Russia works, how power functions, and about the roles of things including ideology, identity, history in shaping the decisions made by everybody from people like Vladimir Putin to ordinary Russian citizens.

And so, at the same time that we've been trying to understand where we are, what Russia is likely to try to do, how it's going to continue to prosecute its war against Ukraine, how it's going to cope with the challenges that that war creates for itself, and how it's going to respond to Western support for Ukraine, how it's going to behave around the world.

There's all of these policy questions we're grappling with very much in the minute. We're also trying to pull apart sort of the building blocks of our analysis of Russia going back over the last 20 or 30 years.

See what parts of those building blocks are still useful, which ones maybe not so much and put them back together in a way that allows us to focus not just on the moment, but allows us to think 6, 18, 24, 36 months down the road about where Russia is headed and what challenges that provides both for us as analysts, but for our audiences as policy makers.

Jakub: So, that's really fascinating and I guess we should get back to it in greater detail, but I'm just incredibly curious on a sort of macro level, looking back, which building blocks turned out to be robust and which ones really weren't so much so.

Sam: Well, I think that probably depends on who you ask. But since you're asking me, I had a piece, this is seared into my memory together with a co-author on the 19th, I believe it was, of December 2021, in which we argued not that a war was impossible. That would've been untenable given that there were 200,000 something troops parked along the Ukrainian border so we could all see what was going on.

But we said that we thought a war was unlikely because it didn't make a lot of sense. It didn't make a lot of sense because we thought that we had an idea of the cost benefit analysis from the Kremlin's point of view.

Not because we can get inside Putin's head. There's certain aspects of this that are always going to be a black box for us. But we've been observing Putin for the last 23 years or so, and we had come to what we thought of as an understanding about how he balances risks and rewards.

That he tries to maintain a certain kind of relationship with the Russian elite, a certain kind of relationship with the Russian public, and that he was actually to a degree risk averse.

He would sometimes do things that didn't make a lot of sense, but that he wasn't interested in upsetting the apple cart of his own power and fundamentally that he was interested in his own power.

Jakub: So, I'd like to explore the question of interpretation. I mean, it's now a subject that there have been tomes of cliches published about how difficult it is to understand the Russian psyche and so forth.

And while that's certainly true, I think what I'm trying to understand is a lot of commentary on why relations with Russia are so difficult come down to this question of interpretation, of being able to see things from a Russian perspective.

To what extent do you feel like that is actually one of the main reasons for this, I'd say consistent, difficult relationship over not just the past couple of years, but really decades or centuries, depending on how far you want to go back.

Sam: Well, I do, and I don't think that that's a problem. It is a problem to the extent that we were talking earlier about sort of cost benefit analysis and about the fact that I, and a lot of other people, I think sort of got our evaluation of Putin's and the Kremlin's cost benefit analysis wrong.

I think that that then often leads us to say, actually we're dealing with a fundamentally irrational actor, and that we can't, and probably shouldn't try to understand how the world works from that person's point of view. I think that's a mistake.

So, I have to come back to the assumption that he is rational, but I don't understand the basis of his rationality. And so, what I need to do as a researcher and as an analyst, as comfortable as it might be, is to pick myself up out of my shoes, put myself into his shoes, and begin to understand what, again, the risks and rewards, costs, and benefits, what the world looks like from his point of view.

The issue where I think it's a little bit more problematic to say that we don't really understand the Russians, is to assume that all the decisions that are being made in Russia, first of all, are being made by some monolithic Russia as a whole.

Russia is an authoritarian country that does create a degree of monolithic behaviour. It creates a lot of pressure for people to conform and not to step out of line, but that also gives a tremendous amount of autonomy to the state.

And we've seen that over the course of this war, that Putin has been able to do, in addition to a tremendous amount of violence to Ukraine. He's been able to do a tremendous amount of violence to his own society and to his own political system and not really pay a price for that.

So, I think there's a limited amount of benefit in looking at Russian culture, Russian history, trying to sort of figure out what it is that makes Russians different from the rest of us. If what we're trying to do at the end of the day is explain the behaviour of the political system.

Jakub: Turning to this question about points of view and maybe what is happening in the world the last couple of years from a Western perspective, it's very easy to become despondent. The last couple of years have not been easy.

Sam: No.

Jakub: Whether it's Trump in the U.S. or it's the challenge of the BRICS. It's the sort of economic model, the prosperity of the middle class. Take your pick. There's a lot of difficulties all over the place.

Russia's coming at it from a very different perspective, from challenging the status quo, trying to turn the table upside down. Have they looked at the past couple of years and said, well, this is fantastic. This is exactly the way ...

Aside from their, I would say humbling military performance in Ukraine, has the world more broadly gone along the lines of what Russia is hoping for, what the Kremlin is hoping for?

Sam: Again, I would put the caveat around this that I don't have access to the four inches between Vladimir Putin's ears. So, I don't really know how he's feeling.

It's hard for me to imagine that he's feeling very good about the way things have gone. You mentioned the humbling of the Russian military, again, it's possible to exaggerate that the reality is that they are not doing as poorly as many of us would like them to be doing.

But you're right. The war has not gone the way that he expected it to. And we I think could be fairly confident in that conclusion, he expected a much more rapid victory. I think those expectations were built to a certain extent on faulting intelligence.

The reality is that he had nobody in his system or anywhere in the Russian bureaucracy or anywhere in the Russian political leadership who was capable of explaining to him what he was going to be up against in Ukraine.

Mostly because there was nobody who actually knew, if you were coming up through the Russian sort of foreign policy establishment or intelligence establishment, you were never going to make your career by being a specialist on Ukraine.

If you were ambitious, you were a specialist on the U.S. or on Western Europe, or on China, or on the Middle East, but not on Ukraine, it was sort of assumed that they knew everything there was to know.

Again, because of this sort of imperialist and colonialist mentality, I think that they went to war on the basis, I think, at least in part of faulting intelligence and faulting assumptions. And they wouldn't be the first people in the world to do that.

But they're paying a price for it. I think they also did not anticipate the degree of the cohesiveness of the Western response both militarily in support of Ukraine and through sanctions and other things in resistance to Russia.

But I think the Kremlin has also found that it's not a catastrophic world from its perspective, that there are still opportunities. It may not be able to turn what Russia refers to as the global majority now against the U.S. and Europe and against Ukraine.

But it is able to drive enough of a wedge in that global system to give it some breathing space. It's hard to imagine, for example, that two years ago, Russia really wanted to be dependent for its military industrial complex on relations with Iran and North Korea.

But it is finding that actually it can make do that way. It's also hard to imagine that Russia really wanted to have its global hydrocarbons exports, limited to essentially India and China. It wanted to have much more liquidity and much more pricing power on the global market, and yet it's finding that it can make do with those arrangements.

So, Russia is willing to accept kind of a second or a third best scenario and willing to make do with the resources that are available to it. And in part because it doesn't have an option.

I think Putin looks at the situation and realises that capitulation would be catastrophic for his system of power and for his personal future. And that's not something he's willing to countenance.

And so, it's not that he looks at the world and thinks, well, okay, this isn't quite going the way I'd like to, maybe we can dial it back. That's not an option that he has. He is going to keep pushing for opportunities wherever he can find them, even if they're not really the opportunities he was hoping to see two years ago.

Jakub: So, not to take away from Ukraine as the key battleground, which I think it is very much right now. It nonetheless feels like for Russia, this is about more than Ukraine.

And I mean, a lot of commentators on the Russian side have stated both military ambitions that go beyond Ukraine, but also, I think a place in the world that looks beyond just sort of control of Ukraine, but Russia as a player in the sort of the global system.

And as you say in a lot of areas, it's clearly not succeeded with its sort of main objectives, but it is succeeding in other ways. What are the areas that Russia sees as opportunities, or what are elements of a kind of world order that Russia is looking to build? What does that look like?

Sam: So, look, I think that Russian foreign policy begins at home. That fundamentally is driven by the imperatives of domestic power for Putin. Putin has felt threatened for a very long time, really going back to the Orange Revolution in 2004, by developments in what the Russians refer to as the near abroad. By developments in the post-Soviet space.

And so, he's reacted poorly to democratic movements and to the fall of incumbent governments in Ukraine, in Georgia, in Kyrgyzstan, in the potential fall of authoritarian rulers and in Belarus and Kazakhstan more recently.

And that has led him to a policy that to a certain extent he inherited from Yeltsin, but that he consolidated of believing that Russia needs to be able to exercise veto power politically, economically and militarily throughout the post-Soviet space with the potential exception of the Baltics.

And that's something he began really building towards fairly early on in his brain. And he has tried to affect sometimes successfully, more often, not successfully throughout his time in office. He sees the rest of the world and the U.S. and Europe in particular as a threat to that ability to maintain dominance in the post-Soviet space.

And so, what he has begun to do over time is to try to undermine the West in general, the EU and the U.S. in particular. Maybe not even because he's fundamentally angry at them, or that he's pursuing some agenda of global domination, but because he wants to make the world safe for his brand of autocracy.

And for Russia's ambitions regionally, he pursues those ambitions regionally. He starts a war in Ukraine, for example, in 2014, and he faces sanctions. So, then the immediate problem that he has to deal with is the structural economic and political power of the West, of the U.S. dollar of the trading system that is dominated by the US and the European Union, of the soft power that the European Union exerts in places like Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, where countries look to integrate economically into a certain extent politically with Europe rather than with Russia.

So, his objective becomes to break that down. He doesn't necessarily have to provide an alternative. He doesn't need to create an alternative global trading system.

But he does need to break down the dominance of the U.S. and Europe in the existing global trading system in order, for example, to make it possible for ghost fleets of ships to trade in Russian oil while evading sanctions and the G-7 Price cap.

So again, I think he's looking for opportunities to make do and to get something that's good enough but it doesn't have to be perfect from his point of view.

Jakub: So, from an eastern European perspective this desire to damage the … and whatever you want to call it, the rule-based order, the Washington Consensus, Liberal society, it feels like something that's detrimental to humanity overall. Because of I think, the aspirations of a lot of East Europeans to join that Western liberal rules-based order.

But it turns out that Vladimir Putin has found a lot of allies in his vision to sort of damage or replace the Western system across the global south. What is driving that? What are the big things that are really rallying people to his side?

Sam: Well, I think there are probably two parts to the answer to that question. One is that what we sometimes refer to as the global rules-based order, not my favourite phrase in the world, but what we sometimes talk about in that way feels differently to different people.

And the reality is whether we're looking within our own societies in the West, and we've seen growing inequality, for example, through the entirety of the period from the global financial crisis in 2007 through the pandemic just a couple of years ago.

And now, sort of the cost that, for example, rising energy prices are imposing on consumers, particularly in Europe, we see that reflected in our own politics. We see that contribute to a sort of anti-establishment mood in a lot of countries. And that gets in the way of consensus on things like Russia and Ukraine.

We see something very similar happening globally. The West, for example, made a lot of promises to the rest of the world, particularly Africa and Latin America on you know, delivering vaccines and aid as a result of the COVID pandemic.

Most of those promises, many of those promises were not kept. And that contributes to a certain amount of anti-establishment sentiment among populations and governments in what the U.S. often referred to as the global south, the Brits like to call it the middle ground. I think it's a somewhat better phrase. But in parts of the world, that are not western and not northern.

But the other part of the answer is that, look, these are not rich countries that we're talking about. These are countries that have very real social, economic and developmental problems that for example, are struggling to deal with their own issues with energy crisis, food price costs and that sort of thing in addition to climate change.

And they don't necessarily have the luxury of feeling like they can choose sides in this fight between the West and Russia and potentially China, depending on where things go. They certainly can't take an economic hit and a social hit just for rhetorical reasons.

And so, when the West says you should get on board and impose sanctions, what they're going up against is a Russia and a China that says, actually, let's keep trading and we'll provide you some trade facilitation and maybe we'll even provide you some discounts and we'll provide you with some loans and some infrastructure investments.

And if you happen to be an authoritarian regime, we can also provide you with Vagner to help put down your opposition and insurgencies. We can provide you with some technical support on propaganda. We can provide you cover in the United Nations and other international forums to make sure that nobody puts too much pressure on what you're trying to do.

And that kind of transactional is going to be welcomed by a certain number of governments. And again, Russia is not asking these countries to join with Russia. They're not even asking them necessarily to vote in favour of Russia in the United Nations.

They're simply asking them not to get fully on board with what the West is trying to do. And they're giving them material and transactional reasons not to do that. And that, for various reasons is a game that the West is at the moment not playing.

Jakub: It sounds like there's almost two elements here. One is the, I would say global discontents with, well, frankly, America. It's mostly people who don't like America, although depending on which part of the world you're talking about, you'll get France baked in there. You'll get the UK being baked in there, or various other European countries. And that is the reason that people cheer on for Russia on social media.

And then you've got the economic aspects, you mentioned the ghost fleet. So, this idea that you can sort of run global shipping without following the rules of global shipping. Various corrupt schemes around energy or just security service and things like that. And those are the sort of the tangible benefits that specifically rulers of various countries can leverage to enrich themselves or secure their position.

That has provided a lot of benefits, or I'd say tactical benefits for Russia around the world. What about internally? Is any of that sort of translating to a country that works that people are happy with?

I mean, recently we had, of course the sort of pogroms in Dagestan, which I think surprised a lot of people. The Vagner coup earlier this year, I wanted to say last year, but it's just because time has become something incredible these days. But how stable is it internally?

Sam: Yeah. So, look, I want to come back to something I said at the very beginning of this conversation about how we have to question some of our assumptions. I think that what we're seeing is evidence of the disconnect between how Russia is governed and how Russian citizens respond to governance.

So, let me explain what I mean. You are absolutely right that yes, while Russia has been able to sort of weather the storm and its economy hasn't collapsed, this war is not making many people richer. And that's true at the top and the bottom of the economy.

So, we can look at the oligarchs, the billionaire class in Russia, and they've lost since the war began something on the order of a hundred billion dollars in aggregate. But a lot of them are still getting rich, and a lot of them have had the opportunity to get even richer than they were before the war.

So, there's still something to play for. It's not as much as there was before, but it's there. They're not as autonomous as they used to be. They don't have access to the resources they used to have in the West. They don't have that degree of sort of fluidity and liquidity that allowed them to be more autonomous.

So, on that basis, the Russian economy as a whole has managed to make do. Russia as an economy is not able to invest the way it could before, it's becoming technologically more primitive. It's becoming much more highly dependent on China in particular both for imports and for exports.

So, economists believe, yes, they'll get through this period of time, but eventually there may be some kind of a breakdown and a crisis, but probably not as soon as most of us would like.

Now, I think ordinary Russians and elites look at that and see all of those things happening and are not terribly happy with them. And yet we see ordinary Russians and elites doing absolutely nothing about it. And that's the analytical conundrum.

Now, elites actually is probably a little bit easier to explain because they're under tremendous amount of pressure and surveillance from the security state. And again, they're not doing as well as they were doing before, but they're doing well enough that the incentive is to stay in the game.

For the public, I think it's a very different calculation. It has historically been true throughout Putin's time in office that Russians by and large understand that the country is poorly governed.

So, ordinary Russians tend to see whatever prosperity and security they have in their lives as the result of their own efforts, not things that the state has done for them, but what they primarily want from the state is just to get out of the way, not to be a problem, not to take things away from them and not to be predatory. Which obviously the Russian state at various levels is quite capable of being.

So, the problem, if what you want is political change in Russia is not to convince Russians that the state is poorly governed, they already understand that. They already know it's corrupt. They already know that Putin governs in the interest of the oligarchs and the elite, and not in the interest of the ordinary Russian citizen.

The challenge is to convince them that if you were to bring somebody else to power, I don’t know, Alexander … or somebody like that, that something would get better. And there is nothing in the living memory of Russians going back to the late Soviet period, that suggests that changes of leadership actually bring material benefits to citizens.

So, the incentive that people have, if they see a problem in the economy in the state, is not to look for a collective solution, not to look for a political solution, but to look for an individual solution.

To say, I'm going to find my own way out of this. I'm going to get a second job. I'm going to move to a different city. I might even leave the country. I'm going to rely on my friends, my relatives, whatever resources I have close at hand, and I'm going to solve this problem for myself. What I'm not going to do is look to the state for a solution, because anytime I look to the state for a solution, things just get worse.

Jakub: I think that's an accurate but quite a pessimistic perspective because it says that there isn't really much that you can do in order to kind of, let's say, nudge the Russian population to change the situation.

Sam: I find it difficult to come to a different conclusion. What I just described is the research perspective that I've developed over the last, I don't know, couple of decades, including a lot of time spent living and working and researching in Russia.

There's plenty of people out there who would disagree with me. But that's my analysis, within that struggle to see a scenario in which regime change, for example, starts from below.

Jakub: Turning back towards the world and the war in Ukraine, there's now more and more voices, I would say, quietly. I don't think there's a lot of people who are coming or a lot of new people who are coming on the record, but we do hear more voices about negotiations, about a ceasefire, about a peace deal.

To what extent is that something that could work in Russia's case? Is any peace deal going to be seen as something other than a temporary halt?

Sam: That's a very good question. It's a very difficult question, but I'm pretty pessimistic about the prospects of any kind of a negotiated ceasefire. Much less a peace agreement for a couple of reasons.

One, this war or some version of this war, both the local war in Ukraine and the geopolitical confrontation that Russia has with the West is now baked into the structure of Putin's power and legitimacy.

It focuses public attention and elite attention on him. It gives him much more power than he had previously. It justifies the degree of repression and control and nationalisation that we see in Russia.

It's beginning to create an ideological structure that is also guiding both mass and elite behaviour in ways that are supportive of the Kremlin. And I do not see a scenario in which Putin can pivot away from that.

So, I think that that is going to be there for as long as he is there. Now, at the same time, there are limitations. So, I think it's very clear that he's not going to go for a massive military mobilisation ahead of the presidential elections next year.

And I'm even sceptical that he would want to do that afterwards. The last one didn't go so well. It does provoke some unrest, mostly because it upends people's individual ability to go about their daily lives.

So, I think that he might be interested in a reduction in the temperature of the fighting. I think he's may have come to the conclusion that, look, if somebody handed him the entirety of Ukraine on his silver platter, he would very happily take it. But that nobody's planning on doing that, and he doesn't necessarily need it.

He can control what he currently controls or some version of it and spin that as enough of a victory to the Russian people. While still claiming that there's a lot more to fight for. And that allows him to maintain this sense of ongoing conflict and confrontation.

He needs to make sure that he, and not Ukraine and not the West, has the ability to control escalation. To decide whether or not there's going to be more fighting or less fighting tomorrow.

So, I think fundamentally, no, there's not a negotiating partner in Russia. Not for ideological reasons, maybe for ideological reasons too, but there's not a negotiating partner in Russia for purely pragmatic political reasons for as long as Putin is in the Kremlin.

Jakub: So, it looks like one of the things that is really weighing on the West's ability to maintain a cohesive and strong sustained level of support is the appearance of “new fronts.”

So, whether it's Israel and Gaza, potentially we've got Taiwan and who knows how many other new fronts across Africa and Asia could spark up.

It feels like from the Western perspective, that is overwhelming. Whereas from a Russian perspective, it's actually something that's quite desirable, as long as you can contain the level of violence and the level of resources that you commit to different fights.

Is it in Russia's interest to spark up additional hostility? Are they benefiting from the war in Israel and Gaza?

Sam: I think they're very clearly certainly hoping to benefit from the war in Israel and Gaza. It certainly helps their case or at least is seen to help their case in the global south.

But as we're seeing in Washington, the Biden Administration has made the argument to Congress and to the American people that what we see, in fact in the Middle East in Ukraine and in either the Taiwan Strait potentially is … nobody's making the argument that this is a coordinated alliance of Beijing, Moscow, Tehran and Hamas.

But that it is a confluence of interest and challenge of forces, whether it's around Hamas, China or Russia that are interested in reducing American power. And so, if Americans think that American power is generally in the interest of America, that it supports our security and prosperity, then it is important that Russia lose in Ukraine.

Just as it could be important that that China lose if it were to try to take over Taiwan. And it's important that Iran lose in whatever it's trying to do vis-a-vis Hamas in Gaza.

So, from that perspective, I think it is useful from Putin's perspective that there are questions being raised in Washington and other places about the wisdom of that approach.

That there are some who were saying, look, we have limited defence industrial capacity, we are struggling to produce the number of arms that Ukraine needs to keep the fight going even at the current level, much less to be able to really put more pressure on Russia that potentially weakens our ability to support Israel, and that potentially weakens our ability to support Taiwan and thus that we need to prioritise.

That is a debate that the Kremlin, and I think probably Beijing very much want the West to have. It buys them time at the very least, and it potentially comes down on the side of the West having to make difficult choices about whom to support.

Now, the administration here, and I'm inclined to agree with, thinks that that's a false choice, that in fact if you abandon one front, what you end up doing is multiplying the pressure that you face on all the other fronts.

Jakub: I mean, that seems incredibly clear when you think about it, that right now if I am a authoritarian and I see the U.S. debate going, well, we feel overwhelmed by two fronts, I'm like, well, perfect. Now is the time to get yeah, whatever thing I wanted to do. Let's just sort of move it forward.

I mean, we saw that in Azerbaijan. I think Aliyev clearly taking advantage of the situation, who's going to stop him? And I know it's difficult for different but equally sort of serious reasons to get a read on China, but it feels like that's the same sort of feeling in Beijing. Like Moscow and Beijing are both benefiting from that instability.

Sam: To an extent. Look, I'm not a China specialist. But my sense is that there are some confluences of interest, but the Chinese and Russian interests are in some ways very different.

Russia benefits from hostilities in the Middle East because it raises the cost of oil. China does not benefit from increasing cost of oil.

Russia wants to alter the global trading system, and China does too, but China doesn't want to break the global trading system because it benefits from it. It profits in it.

And so, there are limits, I think, to the interests and the U.S. and the West could probably get a bit smarter about how to insert itself into some of those gaps. But to the extent that what's going on in the Middle East and thoughts about Taiwan make it more difficult for the U.S. to send the support to Ukraine, that Ukraine needs, yes, I think Beijing will take that as at least a short-term victory as obviously will Moscow.

And that is indeed what we're seeing right now on Capitol Hill where they're moving ahead with support for Israel, and they have for the moment parked support for Ukraine.

Jakub: We're running out of time, so one or two more questions. So, next year we've got elections, not just in the U.S. but we also have them in Russia. What are the chances of a surprise in Russian elections?

I know that probably wouldn't have seemed likely at all for the past 20 years. Is this time around different, given that we've had Vagner, we've had rumblings amongst the intelligence services, there seems to be a lot of discontent. Could it be the black swan event that everyone is hoping for?

Sam: Well, that's the thing about black swan events, is that they're fundamentally unpredictable. So, I mean, the short answer to your question is, yeah, sure. I mean, stranger things have happened.

I think the Kremlin is pretty savvy when it comes to managing elections. It understands that cheating and manipulation are very delicate things that yeah, you can tell people that 80% of the population voted for Putin, and that is the number that they seem to be aiming for.

But you could only do that if people look around them and see that at least kind of 6 out of 10 of the people that they know voted for Putin. If the reality is that kind of 3 out of 10 voted for Putin, and the government is telling you on television that it was 8 out of 10, then people begin to say, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense.

And then you end up in a situation like we saw in Belarus for example. They will be very careful to try to avoid that. So, the Kremlin usually aims for what they call the 70/70 target. Which means 70% of the vote for Putin on 70% turnout.

What we've been told is that they're now aiming looking to next year for 80/80. 80% for Putin, 80% turnout. To show that there's a rally around the flag and everybody's really supporting Putin in the context of this war.

But in order to make that happen, they've added a third 70. So, it's 80, 80, 70, the 70 being that none of the candidates on the ballot. And because it is an election, there have to be people running against Putin. None of them can be younger than 70-years-old because they don't want to make Putin look old.

They understand that the one objection that a lot of people in Russia do have to Putin is he's been around a long time, he's not young. And people might prefer somebody younger.

So, they want to make sure that there isn't a choice who's younger. We're seeing a lot of work being done already in preparing the ground for the electoral campaign.

I mean, even 2021, the parliamentary elections were pretty tightly controlled. And the opposition really was not allowed any breathing space. These elections will be much, much worse than that.

The media space has been eviscerated, the campaign space has been eviscerated, and he's not going to repeat the mistakes of Lukashenko, for example. Lukashenko allowed Tsikhanouski to run because he thought she would be an easy dragon to slay. Putin's not going to play that game.

Jakub: Alright, let's finish off with, so we had Trump won, which I think was a positive for Russia, certainly seems so publicly. How excited are they about the prospects of a Trump two?

Sam: I think potentially very excited for a couple of reasons. One, because they think they might be able to do a deal. And certainly, the Trump campaign has given them every reason to believe that that may be the case. At the very least, you would have an administration that has no love for the Ukrainians and for Zelenskyy in particular.

And so, the Kremlin will take that as a win. But I think, look, in the first Trump administration, the Trump team put political appointees in some places, but they also looked for people in the administration, in the state department, in the National Security Councils and other parts of the foreign policy apparatus who were professionals that were sort of ideologically not opposed to what Trump seemed likely to do.

And so, there were a lot of adults in the room. And that's actually one of the things that led to his first impeachment, for example, because he started doing things that people couldn't countenance.

He is not likely to want to make that mistake again. And if you look at the people that he's bringing into his campaign to support him in sort of his foreign policy team in the campaign, and a lot of those people are then likely to be part of the transition and part of the administration, if he wins, they're much more ideological, they are much less experienced, and they are committed to a very different kind of foreign policy.

They look at people like Orban, they look at people like Erdogan, they look to a certain extent, people like Netanyahu, and they see these authoritarian or semi-authoritarian leaders who have been able to weaponize foreign policy for domestic political purposes.

And to use it as a way of marginalising the opposition of gaining power, and in some cases becoming very wealthy through this sort of transactional relationships. And they would like to replicate that for American foreign policy, or they would like to see the U.S. as a result, withdraw from its institutional relationships.

So, it's long standing relationships with Europe, with NATO, to withdraw from its global alliances in order to give them the flexibility to have that much more transactional and much more politically motivated foreign policy.

And that, to a large extent is exactly the world that Vladimir Putin would like to live in.

Jakub: Well, that sounds absolutely terrifying. Sam Greene, thank you so much for joining us on Power Lines. It was a fascinating if somewhat worrying discussion. Thank you.

Sam: Thank you. Well, this is the world we live in, but it's not the world we have to live in. Thanks again for the conversation. Good luck. Stay safe.

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Jakub: Thanks so much for listening to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World. And thank you also to Sam. Do keep an eye out for his writing and policy work on Russia. It's always worth reading.

Don't forget to subscribe and rate Power Lines wherever you get your podcast, as it really helps others find our show.

To find more podcasts like Power Lines look up Message Heard, wherever you're listening to this podcast. And find us on our website at messageheard.com or on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook by looking up at Message Heard.

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And be sure to check out insights.kyivindependent.com for more in-depth analysis of the war in Ukraine and the future reconstruction of the country.

Season 2 Episode 3

Speakers: Jakub Parusinski & Maria Piechowska

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Jakub: Hello and welcome back to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World, a podcast from Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent. I'm Jakub Parusinski. Each week we're going to be analysing the undercurrents of the war in Ukraine, bringing you analysis from across the globe to explain its context and consequences as the war continues.

This week, we're taking a step back from politics to address an issue which has long had an outsized impact across Eastern Europe. And as the war continues to decimate the population of Ukraine, it's something which has been increasingly amplified. I'm talking about the issue of demography.

First off, a quick explainer of what we mean by this term. Demography is basically the study of human populations, what their fluctuation means for the makeup of a country, its economy and societal structures more generally.

Demographics is a difficult issue for Eastern European countries. To put it mildly. The road out of communism was hard, but one of the redeeming factors was a relatively highly skilled population. This allowed East European countries to maintain some important pieces of their industries, as well as build new ones focused on engineering, tech, and outsourcing.

But the past decades were difficult with a lot of outward migration, low fertility rates, and overall shrinking populations. And the truth is, if you want to build innovative industries, you need motivated, highly educated 20-year-olds to feed into them.

Across the region, populations shrank by 20, 25%, but Ukraine was one of the hardest hits. Its population went down from 52 million in 1991, down to about 45 million in 2013 before the first Russian invasion.

Since then, things have only gotten worse. A lot of people have left. Labour migration has increased, and people have increasingly stayed there and built families outside of Ukraine.

And of course, the situation got drastically worse. After the 24th of February, about 8 million Ukrainians have left the country. Hundreds of thousands have been drafted, tens of thousands have died. The nation is scarred psychologically and physically in many cases.

At present, there's about 30 million Ukrainians living in the country, although nobody is quite sure. And forecasts say that the population could fall to 24 million by the end of the decade.

But it's not just about absolute numbers, it's also about the road ahead. And that part might be grimmer still. Ukraine had an extremely low fertility rate going into the full-scale invasion, and the threat of bombs, genocide, and constant waking up with rocket alarms all night is not really conducive to family planning. A lot of the Ukrainians who do have families are now abroad. So, there's a big question about where the next generation is going to come from.

To help us learn more about Ukraine's demographic issues this week I invited Maria Piechowska onto Power Lines. Maria is a cultural anthropologist from Poland, and she currently works at the Polish Institute for International Affairs, a leading think tank that analyses international issues and obviously has a big focus on Ukraine.

She has recently written some fascinating political and social analyses that focus on the relationship between Poland and Ukraine. And demography plays a big role. We spoke about the historical issues of demography in Ukraine, how the war has drastically changed things, and what can be done in the future to prevent a demographic catastrophe.

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Maria, welcome to Power Lines. Great to have you on the show.

Maria: Thanks, Jakub. Good to see you, and I hope we have a good talk.

Jakub: So, could you tell us a little bit about your work at the Polish Institute of International Affairs?

Maria: So, I'm a political analyst. I'm dealing with Ukraine. It's my first area of expertise, but from my education, I'm an anthropologist, so that's why I'm more interested in the social things, culture things, also demographics, migration, and culture, of course.

Jakub: So, that's a perfect fit for the topic that we will be discussing today, which is unfortunately, I think quite a pessimistic one. But I'd love to hear your opinion about this, and that is the demographics of Ukraine.

So, before we get to the situation today, could we maybe go back in time a little bit? So, Ukraine leaves the Soviet Union in 1991. It has a population of 52 million. What was the demographic story back then? What happened between then and now?

Maria: So, first of all, post-Soviet countries had very low fertility rate. And it's important to understand people just, “Well, they didn't want, they couldn't, they were not able to afford, have kids, they just have to do to several things.”

But Ukraine was quite in good shape, I could say, because Ukraine was always good place to live. If you think about, of course, post-Soviet. So, a lot of people moved into Ukraine. I'm talking still 90s.

So actually, during first 10 years from this 51 and a half million people, which we know that in ‘89 census were. It was counted after 10 years, it was 48 and a half. So, it was not so big difference.

Jakub: Yeah.

Maria: And actually, this was the census of 2001 and was the only one census that Ukraine made during its independence. It's very important to understand that because to be honest, we don't have very good data on population numbers.

Jakub: That actually is a very important point and thank you for raising it. So yes, like you said, the first decade we have Ukraine dropping a little bit. It's not just about fertility as far as I know, it's also migration. Russians living in Ukraine, moving to Russia, Uzbeks living in Ukraine, moving to Uzbekistan and so forth. And it drops a little bit.

And then 2001, and this is the last real census that we have for Ukraine. And since then, there hasn't been any data, but the situation got a lot worse.

Maria: Yeah. So first, several reasons, like already you said that people just moved out from Ukraine, and Ukrainians by itself, they started to go abroad mostly to work, and it was kind of labour migration, which we called circular.

So, people just went for some time to another country, they worked, and they come back, but some of those people stayed. And the biggest number of people, and we are talking about just before of course Russia invaded Ukraine, and I'm talking about 2014.

So, it was Russia, the Ukrainians were moving, were working in Russia. And we don't know exact numbers because very often it was not noted in any statistic. But was a huge group up to three, even more million people who are just living in Russia. And this migration in Russia was also circular, but a lot of people decided to stay due to there was no language issues. It was just easy to move and work in Russia.

Jakub: And salaries were higher. The quality of the infrastructure was better. It was just a better place to live. So, before we get into the situation since 2014 and the Russian invasion, maybe one other important question to raise is, well, why does demography actually matter that much? Why is it really important?

Maria: So, in the demography, not the number is the most important actually, but the structure of society, because we want to have a lot of kids, we want to have a lot of people in working age so they can support all social benefits for elderly who cannot work anymore. And it's called social solidarity.

So, we need everything to be in good proper, let's say, structure. So, society as in state works, and in Ukraine, the problem started to be that because of a low fertility rate for a small and more elderly people.

So, we have the situation, not so many kids are born. A lot of people in this working age are moving out of Ukraine and situation starting to be worse and worse. That's why demography actually very matters a lot.

Jakub: Yeah. So, as you mentioned, it's not just about the absolute numbers, but it's the balance. And what you want is you want enough people of productive age to support the rest of society, the children, the elderly.

And so, Ukraine's population basically continues to fall and to age. It's got low fertility, it's got a lot of productive people moving out, and then it feels like there is a tipping point or a drastic change. And that comes with the Russian invasion. And of course, as you mentioned, the invasion of 2014, not the latest one.

Maria: Yes. Well, we have to imagine what happened in 2014. It's not about the war with Russia that it started, but Ukraine lost Crimea and Ukraine lost control over Donbass. It was quite especially Donbass; the population density was quite hyper.

And from this moment, we don't know exactly what's happening in Ukraine if we talk about numbers of people, because some people stayed in Donbass and in Crimea, some left. I mean, we have estimation of course, but exact numbers, we have no idea.

And we have this problem, which already I said, that there are no censuses. So, we can only imagine an estimate. Of course, what are the actual numbers? But the thing is that there is a lot of different estimates, and some counts those people in Donbass, some are not counting those people in Donbass. So, it's not very easy to understand all those numbers.

Jakub: Yes. So, let's talk about data a little bit. You already brought up the topic. It's one that is very tricky. So, I read some analysis that in the past couple of years before the full-scale invasion of ‘22, there were several attempts to estimate how many people there were.

One study in 2019, the Dubilet census looked at the amount of mobile users, and based off of that, estimated that there's 37 million people in the country that did not include Donbass and Crimea.

There was another project that estimated that there was about 42 million, including Donbass, but not including Crimea. So, maybe before we even go to that, why didn't Ukraine have a census? Isn't that something that you're supposed to do according to the United Nation guidelines every 10 years?

Maria: Exactly. And Ukraine was asked several times to make this census, but it's always a problem of money. It's problem of organisation, problem in Ukraine. It's also the people didn't want to answer in census.

So, the solution supposed to be in 2019, this electronic estimation, it's supposed to be electronic census. It didn't work really out, but it gave us some numbers. Like you said, it was I think 37 millions of people.

And this estimation was based on people who are using mobile phones. It is very interesting, actually, in Poland, there were similar statistics on Ukrainians who were working in Poland. We tried to check how many mobile phone users use Ukrainian language in their mobile phones. I think it was possible to achieve this data. So, we had some numbers from this.

So, it doesn't mean that it makes no sense at all, but still people who works in demography, they didn't like it at all. And it's still estimation, it's not a census. But it was important because it was trying to answer the question, how many people are living in Ukraine, in control territory of Ukraine?

Because usually in any kind of statistics there’s a problem of migration, is very difficult to catch the migration because if we, for example, check the people who are just signed to their apartments, usually they are not signing out when they are just moving abroad.

So, it's really a huge problem how to estimate the migration. So, it's supposed to give these answers, but was a lot of, like I said, problems, the demographers didn't like it at all.

So, we have to treat this number 37 millions as estimation, but more or less, it gave us a sense of how many people we have in Ukraine. So, 1989, we had over 50 millions, and 2019 was less than 37 millions of people living in Ukraine.

Jakub: Yes, I understand that. It actually reminds me a little bit of my experience living in Kyiv. And Kyiv, there was always a question of how many people lived there. Was it 2 million? Was it 4 million, was it 5 million?

And one of the estimates was done on the amount of baked goods that were sold, basically how much bread was sold. And based on that, I remember that in the sort of mid-2010s, they said, well, it's probably about three and a half million. But yes, this is of course not very scientific.

Maria: Yeah. But still it's kind of estimation and all this kind of estimation, if we have a lot of different estimation at the end, we have some kind of idea how much people is living, for example, in Kyiv.

But if we go back to this mobile phone census, for example, when I'm going for a week to Kyiv, I'm buying sim card just to have internet. So, this census would catch me as a Ukrainian. So, it shows why it cannot be good scheme for-

Jakub: There’s a lot of issues to correct for in this kind of model.

Maria: Yeah, of course. But still.

Jakub: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I totally understand. You mentioned that a lot of the post-Soviet countries experienced low fertility and a drop in population, but still this is at least 20%, maybe even more depending on how you count the data. How does Ukraine compare to other countries in the region?

Maria: So, it's nearly same. I mean, the situation, our whole area is quite bad. Even in countries such as Poland, which is in better situation, the problem with this fertility rate is quite big problem. And a lot of programs, which is they are made by state, they are not actually helping the situation. They are not working.

So, fertility is very tricky question. It's very hard to stimulate this fertility rate. I mean, of course, we all know that if mothers will have a lot of benefits, if families will have a lot of benefits, if there will be whole system to support kids and their mothers who, for example, wants to go back to work or who wants to stay at home, we can do a lot of things.

But still, it doesn't mean that at the end we'll make a big change in fertility. Right now, and I'm just talking about from this polish perspective, immigration can be a solution.

So, the societies like Poland needs a lot of immigrants just to help these demographics. And in Ukraine, well, it would be good if people move to Ukraine, but as far as we know, it would be hard to persuade them to come to Ukraine right now.

Jakub: Yes, even sort of hopefully with a victory and a positive result coming sooner rather than later, it would be quite tricky. You mentioned Poland, it feels like ironically the solution to Poland's demographic problem has been the arrival of lots of working age Ukrainians, so-

Maria: Yes, and it's a huge problem because we have a situation that in Poland where we have the biggest group of Ukrainians abroad it's also refugees. But also, this pre-war labour migrants.

So, it's good for Polish economy that they stay, but we also all understand that if we want to have Ukraine growing and be better country to live than it is now, or to rebuild, we need all most of these people to be back to Ukraine.

So, it'll be a huge problem for Poland and Ukraine in the future. But right now, we focus on helping the refugees, so they are safe here in Poland.

Jakub: So, now moving to the current situation, since the full-scale invasion, obviously we don't have exact figures. The data has, if anything, become much more difficult to obtain. But what is the big impact? What are the main sort of impacts on Ukrainian demographics so far?

Maria: If we can, I would go back a little bit to the past, because what we see after 2014, like I said before 2013, we had a lot of Ukrainians who are working in Russia. And after 2014, due to several reasons, for example, like Poland needed a labour force.

And after 2017 was visa free regime for Ukrainians in EU, we have a huge labour migration mostly to Poland, but also to Italy, Czech, also Portugal and Spain. And there's a lot of Ukrainians who some are just kind of new migration builders just decided after 2014 to work abroad, some of those people who are working before in Russia decided to work in Poland or over European Union states.

So, we have this situation that we have a lot of people working abroad, and still, we don't know exactly how much. For example, there's a lot of people who are just coming to Poland on this visa free regime. And they started to work.

We don't know exactly how many people we had in Poland and or any other Ukrainian states. We estimated, which was like something between million and three millions of people just in Poland.

But the official numbers was also bit lower. So, there was one and a half million of Ukrainians who had residence permits in EU. So, those people probably were not circulating anymore. Like I said, it's labour migration, it's circular, but people just a few weeks in Ukraine, they were going for a few weeks or few months, for example, to Poland or to Italy, and then they are coming back to Ukraine.

So, it's also hard to say where they are actually staying in Ukraine, in EU and probably if we ask those people, they wouldn't be able to answer this question. So, it's also tricky thing for census statistics.

Jakub: So, this is a fascinating question, and I think I'd love to explore it, especially from the sort of cultural anthropologist perspective that you bring about whether Ukraine should start to think about its demography in sort of almost a postmodern way, not as people living in Ukraine, but Ukrainians internationally and connecting them.

But before we get to that, I think let's just catch up to sort of today. So, on February 24, we have the full-scale invasion. This is the most disruptive event for Ukrainian demography and millions of refugees, millions internally displaced, massive casualties. Do we have any idea of how big of an impact this has had on Ukrainian demographics?

Maria: Amazing impact. I mean, amazing and huge because amazing maybe it's too positive word. Like I said, we had this labour migration already, a lot of people working abroad. And then on 24th of February, we had millions of people who just decided in minutes to leave Ukraine and go west mostly, most of people went west.

So, in this first moment, we had more than eight millions of Ukrainian refugees in Europe. And we have to remember that we have also a lot of people who had to go to Russia. I mean, most people who were and are in occupied territories, they didn't have any chance to run away to west of Ukraine and Western countries.

They had to run away to/or through Russia because some of them didn't stay in Russia. They were able to go through Russia to Western countries. But we still, it's a problem. We don't know how many, various estimates, but it's around three millions of Ukrainians who are in Russia or a little bit less. But still, we don't know, and we cannot trust Soviet estimates, Russia estimates.

Jakub: Bit of a Freudian slip there, but I totally understand. Yeah.

Maria: So, we have a lot of people who moved abroad and most of them stayed. Right now, we know that there is around 6 million of refugees in Europe. Some people moved to also, there's a lot of people who moved to Canada or to U.S., but it's this not a huge number. We compare to Poland and Germany.

The countries that host right now, the biggest number of refugees is Poland, which is around a little bit less than million of refugees and Germany that has a little bit of more of million of refugees.

Jakub: And as you mentioned, that's on top of the people who were previously labour migrants, right?

Maria: Yes, exactly.

Jakub: And so, we're talking about, already probably the amount of people who's living on government-controlled territories of Ukraine going down to 30 million or something in that vicinity.

Before, sort of going further on that, demographics is not just the absolute numbers of people, as you mentioned, it's also about the balance, but I think it's also about the sort of the vitality of the people, their ability to be part of society, to have children and so forth.

And here we look at quite devastating impact on the psychology of Ukrainians. The massive amounts of PTSD casualties and so forth. What is the impact of the war beyond sort of the absolute numbers, and is there any way to sort of think about that?

Maria: So, first of all, the war means the stability. People are not safe anymore. And if we look at the Ukraine, it's not about Eastern Ukraine. In whole Ukraine, you have air alarms in whole Ukraine, kids has to go to shelters.

And it makes a huge impact on psychology. I mean, this society will have a lot of problems after the war with PTSD, all the stress things. And it's the first thing. And the stability and insecurity can lead to lower this fertility, which we already had quite not so high. So, it'll be a lot of problem, a big problem.

The other thing is just war casualties, we don't know exact numbers because for Ukraine, this number is really strategic thing. But if we go through Ukraine, even if we travel by train to Kyiv, we can see in every village that we are passing through the new graves in the local graveyards.

So, it's a really huge number of people who are dead, are very well wounded, and it'll be another problem. We'll have a lot of people who are wounded, but not only physically, but just they will have PTSD, they won't be able to live a normal life probably.

So, it will have impact on society and of course on this fertility rate, because we have to understand that people who are going to fight very young, there are people who supposed to have kids right now.

Jakub: Like to just pick up one thing that you mentioned there about the trip into Kiev and how we see in every village, dozens, even in small villages, dozens of images, photos of people who have already died. There is a sense that the small towns and villages are bearing the brunt of the mobilisation.

When you look at Kyiv, there's quite a lot of people, but it's a sort of a fake impression, or it's an illusion that there is a sense of normality. When you go into the smaller towns, it's really kind of devastating.

The government is probably making the calculation that you want to maintain people who are in economic centres because of their importance to the economy. It's a difficult and cynical decision in a sense, but it's a necessary one.

Is there anything like that being done for younger Ukrainians? Because as you mentioned, it's the 20-year-olds who are fighting, who should be having children.

Maria: Yes. I've heard rumours, but right now the 25 is this age when most of people are drafted until they're 25. So, I've heard rumours that usually they're drafted a bit later. But as anthropologist, I can say, it doesn't matter if this rumour is right, the thing is that people think that fertility is important, so they understand that having kids it's really important thing. Will it mean that they will have more kids? It's hard to say.

Jakub: So, the numbers, I think I saw that for 2022, is that the amount of births dropped by a third, but a lot of these were conceived before the full-scale invasion. So, there is a bit of a delayed effect. Do you expect 2023 to be even worse, and is there a baby booming prospect?

Maria: I don't think this baby boom will be now, or even if it will be after the victory very quickly.

But still, this numbers, what we know. I don't like numbers because for example, if we talk about fertility rate a lot of kids who are born abroad, the parents supposed to register them in Ukrainian consulates, but if they're living far away, they won’t to do this.

So, this number is also not final, I would say. So, we don't know exact numbers, but there won't be a baby boom.

Jakub: Okay. And I think we will move to the reconstruction in a second, but the goal of Russia here is in many ways the destruction of Ukraine as a nation. It is failing to do so, at least as effectively as it would want to on the front lines, but is it managing to do that through demography?

Maria: Yes. And if we think about all these kids that Russia is kidnapping actually, taking from occupied territories, there is a whole scheme how to take Ukrainian kids from occupied territories by Russia and take them to adoption in Russia.

It shows that Russia has a big, big demographic problems, and they're looking at Ukraine to, let's say, take those kids to make Russians from them, because this will, maybe … it's not a big number. I mean, it won't solve our Russian problems, but we talk now about at least 20,000 of kids who are kidnapped by Russia, and they're now in a process of making them Russians and they're being given to adoption.

So, it's what Russia does. They are trying to fight also Ukrainians by demography and by taking their kids.

Jakub: This is an absolutely tragic topic. We're talking about tens of thousands of children, and every week I see the NGOs, the president celebrating the recovery of 1, 2, 3, 4 kids.

And of course, I mean, especially if you have children, you understand that there is no single individual kid that you can abandon. But while Russia is taking thousands, tens of thousands of them, Ukraine is fighting for every single individual, which just makes for an incredibly tragic process.

Let's sort of move forward, look a little bit at what is coming. So, there is a hope for a big Ukrainian reconstruction. Everyone is talking about it, mobilising funds. There were hopes that it would already start, but the war is ongoing. We don't know when the final date will come, that reconstruction will require people. How painful are the current demographic losses for the rebuilding of Ukraine?

Maria: So, first of all, for rebuilding Ukraine those people in working age are required, and a lot of them are in the army or are abroad. So, it's a huge problem, and it'll be a problem because the government can create some kind of policy of helping people to return, but it's very hard to do.

We also know from Polish perspective that after 2004, a lot of people from Poland to moved to UK, there were a lot of programs to make them to return to Poland, and they didn't want, they started to return when situation in Poland started to be better, and — happened. So, it was not so easy due to bureaucracy to stay in UK.

So, some people decided to come back, but the program is very hard to make a good program that people return. So actually, what can make people return, it's actually good perspectives at home. So, the Ukraine will be really in a good position, we'll have money.

And from economic point of view is very hard to make people to return. And I believe that if Ukrainians will know that they will be in EU and NATO, it'll be a trigger to make them return to Ukraine, because EU for them means stability, NATO means for them security. So, it can help those people to decide to go back to Ukraine.

Jakub: So, there's one thought that I keep sort of thinking about, and that's the case of Israel, which has a large population abroad, but it also has a circular population. So, many Israeli colleagues that I know have come back to Israel for several years and then moved back to the U.S. or Western Europe or Asia.

And they come back, they work, they maintain ties abroad. Is this a model for Ukraine? If a third of the population is abroad, is it time to think about its population in a different way?

Maria: So, before the invasion, this labour migration was a huge help to countries’ GDP, the number of remittances, financial remittances that were inflowing to Ukraine from this labour migration was 12 or 10% of GDP.

So, it was a huge impact on the country and also on the level of living the people who stayed because those people were just investing their families investing in their villages. So, it was very important, and this is just from this financial point of view.

But you're talking about the role of diaspora actually, and it's very important. In Ukraine, they didn't make it well versus strategy of Ukrainian international relations, which was published just 2020, I think.

And first also they said something that diaspora is important, but it didn't really work out. For example, very important is kind of Ukrainian education abroad, and I'm not talking about regular schools, but even kind of Sunday schools. So, kids that are staying abroad, they will feel connection to Ukraine as even if they are growing up abroad.

So, it's a lot of things that Ukraine could do better, and they should, or they even have to make it better right now when they have this huge diaspora, because the diaspora will create any kind of economic ties who will be interested in investing in Ukraine. This diaspora can be interested. So, it's very important for Ukrainian state just to invest in these ties with diaspora.

Jakub: I think one thing that characterises Ukraine today is how incredibly mobilised the society is, whether it's mobilised domestically to fight against Russia, to work on keeping the country together, mobilised internationally to get donations and support for Ukraine.

Is that mobilisation something that can be a driver? Because you mentioned the Polish programs, but Poland was not under existential threat. So, to what extent can that be a positive factor in, in perhaps an otherwise quite bleak picture?

Maria: So actually, this our talk was very pessimistic, but this point it can be really optimistic because Ukraine society is unbelievably resistant, I would say, and unbelievably mobilised. We understand that if they stop fighting … it will just vanish.

I believe that this mobilisation where it'll also help people to return to Ukraine, especially these refugees. But they will have kids, they will try to rebuild, even if it'll be really hard for them, they will still keep up rebuilding their country.

And I'm quite optimist in this part because we think about last 30 years, it was not easy to be Ukrainian. It was not easy to live in Ukraine. But people, they are just doing this. They're trying to do their best, and I believe they will do the best in the future.

Jakub: So, one thing that has struck me is that a lot of colleagues, Ukrainians who have moved abroad, they aren't coming back, or they are thinking about coming back because at the end of the day, they want to be part of the story.

They also find it more comfortable living in Ukraine. It turns out that working and living in a lot of Western countries is not as easy as it seems. What has me a little bit concerned is the question of time. And recently I talked to a colleague who mentioned that there's an uptick in sales of real estate in Kyiv.

So, I was in Ukraine during Euromaidan, and I arrived a couple of years after the Orange Revolution. And every crisis that happened, the people would not sell real estate even though the prices had dropped, they would hold it hoping that they can recover at least how much they invested in it.

It looks like that situation is changing. I guess what I'm asking is obviously we want Ukraine to be successful and for the war to end and to move to the reconstruction. How sort of feasible is it to keep that mobilisation going and that feeling of patriotism for months or years?

Maria: So, this keeping this mobilisation is crucial for Ukraine and we also as partners of Ukraine, we have to help them. So, like I said, this possibility of joining EU, and I'm not talking about possibility somewhere in the future, but they have to understand that they will be in European Union. It's something that will keep up this symbolization, same with NATO membership.

So, it's very important that Ukrainians will have not only hope, because right now they are on the way to European integration, but they need to be sure that they will be in European Union. It's very important.

I mean, and I'm not talking about the state, I'm talking about just normal people who will know that now they have to suffer, but at one point it'll be alright for them.

Jakub: That's actually a very nice message, I think to Western Capitals, that Ukrainians are doing the fighting and dying for Europe because Russia has repeatedly said that Ukraine is not the end goal. The end goal is much further.

The responsibility to keep Ukraine and hope alive is an important one, but I think one that hopefully at least Europe can manage. Maria Piechowska, thank you very much for joining Power Lines.

Maria: Thank you and it was a pleasure to talk to you.

[Music Playing]

Jakub: Thanks so much for listening to Power Lines from Ukraine to the world and a big thanks to Maria for coming on this week.

We'll be back in two weeks’ time with an episode looking at how wider global crises are affecting the war. The ongoing conflict in Israel and Palestine has real implications for Ukraine, and we're going to assess whether the global instability it is causing its strengthening or weakening Russia's hand in the country.

Don't forget to subscribe and rate Power Lines wherever you get your podcasts, as it really helps others find our show. To find more podcasts like Power Lines look up Message Heard, wherever you're listening to this podcast and find us on our website at messageheard.com or Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook by looking up @messageheard.

You can also follow the Kyiv Independent on Twitter and Facebook at Kyiv Independent and Instagram at kyivindependent_official, to get the latest news and stay up to date with our coverage.

And be sure to check out our new project KI Insights, by going to insights.kyivindipendent.com. There you'll find a lot of deep dive analysis and behind the scenes looks at what is happening in Ukraine.

Season 2 Episode 2

Speakers: Jakub Parusinski & Jakub Górnicki

[Music Playing]

Jakub: Hello and welcome back to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World, a podcast from Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent. I'm Jakub Parusinski. Each week we're going to be analysing the undercurrents of the war in Ukraine, bringing you analysis from across the globe to explain its context and consequences as the war continues.

This week, we're continuing our look into politics across Europe, focusing on some elections that could change the nature of the conflict in Ukraine. And on Sunday, October 15th, we saw one of the most pivotal elections in Europe this year in Poland.

So, Poland has been ruled by Law and Justice known as PiS, in their Polish acronym for the past eight years. And in that time, it's basically become a poster child for a illiberal, alt-right and other strong men driven countries around the world.

The PiS government built up a system that was observed and emulated by strong men from Erdogan in Turkey to Netanyahu in Israel, and of course, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, for how to basically make their countries more authoritarian while still staying above the line of what actually constitutes a dictatorship.

And things got bad. PiS took control of the media, of the courts, limited women's rights leading to millions protesting on the streets of Poland every couple of months for different reasons.

To understand just how significant the propaganda was, Timothy Garton Ash, a commentator on Poland once said that Polish state television makes Fox News look like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The level of propaganda was simply atrocious.

On the other side, we have an opposition that is mostly pro-European liberal, and then has various shadings from centre right to centre left. Mostly it's the Civic Coalition, which is a sort of Christian Democrat kind of party.

There is now Third Way, which is a combination of a centrist and a agrarian party, as well as the New Left, which is a very classical social democrat, European political platform.

But what really made the difference in these elections is the return of Donald Tusk, the former president of the European Council and former Prime Minister of Poland. He and Jarosław Kaczyński, a leader of PiS, have a feud going on for decades at this point.

And both figures are rather polarising. They have their lovers and their haters, but they're both coming at the question with very different views of where the country should be.

Jarosław Kaczyński sees Poland as a country that needs to be a sovereign nation, relatively isolated from the world, traditional, conservative, very much in the likes of the kind of strong men regimes that you have across the Eurasian supercontinent.

Tusk, as the former president of the European Council, has quite a different vision. He sees a Poland that's in Europe, that is actively engaged with the West, and that champions what I would call classical humanist values with a certain level of liberalism, both in the economy and society.

And then on the edge, we have Confederation, a openly anti-Ukrainian, anti-European and rather pro-Russian organisation of far-right nationals who have been pulling PiS to the right.

So, what was the result? Well, Poland's lower house of parliament, which is really decisive here, has 460 seats, and you need 230 of them to have a vote of confidence and start a new government.

Law and Justice was hoping to get at least in that vicinity, potentially with the addition of the votes from Konfederacja. And it didn't get there. It got 194 seats. And with Konfederacja’s 18, only gets to 212 seats.

The coalition of opposition parties, including the Civic Coalition, the Third Way, and the New Left, got a total of 248 enough to form the government. But that doesn't mean that they will take power straight away. Actually, the road ahead could be rather challenging, and the process could go on for a while, which we'll talk about later.

So, why does all of this matter for Ukraine? Well, first of all, Poland is the logistical hub of the whole war. It is the essential piece in Ukraine being able to continue the fight.

And Konfederacja, for example, has issued threats that they would create disruptions to the airport in Rzeszów, for the train station in Przemyśl, both key choke points for moving things in and out of Ukraine.

But the Polish-Ukrainian relationship is about much more. There are long economic ties. There are millions of Ukrainians currently living in Poland, and the two countries have a shared if difficult history.

Relations between the two have actually gotten quite bad in recent months due to a couple of feuds, including a notorious grain ban.

The elections now offer a fresh start, but perhaps even something more for Ukraine, with a potential prime ministership of Donald Tusk. Again, a leader of the European Union in the past, Ukraine has a potential partner that could fast track its path to the European Union if it's able to engage Poland effectively.

Whether that will happen or not is something that we talked about this week with Jakub Górnicki, a journalist and media manager from Poland.

Jakub is the founder of Outriders, a Polish news organisation that writes about global issues for a Polish audience. He's been covering the war in Ukraine for years and even more so since the full-scale invasion.

So, I invited him onto Power Lines to discuss what happened last week in Poland, what it means for the country's often fractious relationship with Ukraine, and how it will change the face of European politics more generally.

[Music Playing]

Jakub, welcome to Power Lines.

Górnicki: Hello, Jakub. Thank you for having me.

Jakub: Could you just to start us off, tell us a little bit about your work?

Górnicki: So, I work in the organisation called the Outriders. We provide Polish audience with the news and updates about different events which happen outside of Poland, whether it's breaking events or important events such as Russian invasion in Ukraine, or currently the conflict in Israel and Palestine, or we produce stories about environmental issues, migration and so on.

Jakub: And you have an extensive experience in Ukraine, which I would love to get to a little bit later because this is also one of the important dimensions to consider.

But before that, I think first of all, we need to say we're recording this on the late afternoon of Tuesday, October 17th. The final tally is in, it looks very much like a confirmed victory for the opposition coalition.

Górnicki: Yes.

Jakub: What is the mood like right now in Poland?

Górnicki: So, first of all, I think the majority of people is happy because we have to say that those three parties, which are considered the Democratic, the liberal opposition, have gathered 4 million votes more than Law and Justice, PiS, how you want to call them.

So, the party, which has been ruling for the past eight years, and for sometimes still, whether it's days or weeks, depending how the transition of power will happen, will be in power.

So, that's the first thing. I think the most important factor besides the win of course, of the opposition is that over 74% of Polish people eligible to vote went to actually do it, which is the highest turnaround in the history of Polish democracy. It's even more than 1989 elections, although they were partially free, let's say, but considered important.

And then later on, I mean, there have been elections where there was like 50 something percent of the people showing up to the vote. Whereas this 74, that's basically, three out of four people in many districts.

In Warsaw, I think it's around 84, 85%, with some districts with 90%, which is incredible, which shows how important those elections have been to the Polish society. It gives, I think enormous legitimacy and also pressure for the soon to be the new government.

But it also shows, I think the commitment to certain values, which Poland stands for and the Polish people stand for. It's clear in which direction the society wants to go. It's also clear what the society doesn't want, and especially what was pissing people off, I think, especially during the second term of the Law and Justice which is 2019, up until now.

Jakub: I think first we just need to spend a moment, for two Polish guys, this should come quite naturally and just talk about why Poland is so important.

I think one thing to bear in mind, and this came across in conversations that I've had with people all over the world, there's been a trend towards this kind of, whatever you want to call it, nationalistic, conservative, alt-right, Eurosceptic, people who sort of shy away from liberalism and globalisation and all of this kind of values.

And Poland was very much a poster child for that movement. It hosted that movement. Poland was the centre of this rebirth of illiberal civilization. So, I think that's a really important aspect to it.

And the attempt to take over or sort of for the opposition to win, it failed in Turkey, it failed in Hungary, it failed in so many countries. So, I think that's a huge symbolic win, I think, all over the world. Is that something that's present in Poland as well, this feeling?

Górnicki: Yeah, I think so. There is couple of reasons why we managed to break out of this. It's first of all, I think that we still — even though, especially the state-owned media, the public TV channel and public radio stations, although they have been controlled by the government, and they have become a tube of really disgusting propaganda, still when it comes to the media operating on the free market.

Besides the local press being bought out by them government controlled state-owned petro company, by the way, that has the flow of free information and the amazing work, many investigative reporters and all the other media, that has been one of the key things which led to this.

But on the other thing, I think what's really important is that simply this government didn't notice how the society is changing. And that the Polish people are becoming more progressive. Our society has more migrants in it.

Jakub: Yeah.

Górnicki: And not only Ukraine, but people from different countries. And that the fabric of the society is simply different. The needs are different. And at the end of the day, I think the arrogance mixed with the brutality of propaganda is something what made people like saying, just, this is not what we want.

And the fact that we still were able to vote, but be surrounded mostly, most of us by the access to the free information. And I think of in the end a very good campaign led by the three opposition parties and very bad campaign by the Law and Justice Party.

Jakub: Yeah. So, I wanted to ask you, everyone talks about free and fair elections. Was this election free and was it fair, the two sort of separately?

Górnicki: No, I don't think it was fair election, especially because we are talking about state controlled our public media. They have law which they should obey, which is serve all the public. Whereas it was serving basically the needs of one party, which was ruling.

And they were not, for example, showing any public meetings, public gatherings of any of the opposition parties. We had the same situation in 2020 during the presidential elections. Many people believed that if that coverage of that election would be back then held more fairly, the outcome could be different.

Because the difference between Duda, Andrzej Duda, our current president and Rafał Trzaskowski who was the runner up was just very little.

So, I think that was the lesson learned also from that 2020, also, the fact that opposition politicians came back to the public broadcaster, they stopped boycotting it and so on. It was never pleasant. Watching this was just disgusting.

But the fact that they went, and they entered that field, I think was also crucial. It also showed people that they really want to make the change. And I think that feeling that they can win was something crucial for all the voters.

Because in the last elections, you couldn't feel that yes, the opposition can win. That feeling was not there. Whereas this time people really believed that the change is possible. And I think this is also what motivated people to go to elections in such a high number as they did.

Jakub: Okay. I'm going to move on to sort of what happens next. But just one final question that I'm curious about. So, Poland was for a long time, the playbook of how do you build an authoritarian society.

Górnicki: Mm-Hmm (affirmative).

Jakub: Was the performance of the opposition so good that it now has a playbook of how to bring it apart? Or did they get lucky?

Górnicki: Well, actually, a comeback of the opposition to power began in the end of 2020, when the Law and Justice using the constitutional tribunal, made a change to the abortion law, rendering it from rigorous to basically non-existent.

And the massive protests, which began back then, where I think if we were going back, this is where basically Law and Justice started to lose, first of all, they lost 10% of the popularity in impulse, and they never basically made it back.

Second thing, it led to creation of many women movement. It woken up a lot of people in the civic society.

Later on, we have, I think the very important moment was still the return of Donald Tusk to the politics. Whether someone agrees with him or not, he changed the game.

Jakub: He's a political force. I mean, to be reckoned with. Yeah.

Górnicki: He's a political force. He made unpopular moves among voters of the Democratic opposition, which later people started to understand, in many cases. He took a very hard stand on the migration. He wasn't falling for all the traps which were being set for him by the government propaganda.

He said he will not take down the wall, for example, on the Polish by the Russian border. And so on and so on. So, and for that, he was criticised by some of the opinion leaders, even among other oppositions.

But later on, people understood that he understands the game slightly better. And I used the game because it was kind of set up like this. You have to understand when you fight with such powers that well, you have to play differently.

And then I think, in the end, also very important role here was I think the Russian invasion in Ukraine. And the question of security, of feeling secure played an important role.

In all the surveys of Polish society, the safety is number one, number two issue, generally understood. People feel that with this conflict, with the situation, still ongoing migration situation on Polish by the Russian border.

Jakub: Let's look at what the road ahead has for us. And the coalition has won on paper. PiS has already announced that they will be various deputies, have announced that they will be a difficult opposition, that they will try to drive a wedge between the coalition partners. They'll try to make this whole thing fall apart.

But first we have the decisions of actually forming a government. And so, the president has to nominate a PM. Historically, that was from the biggest party, so now it would be PiS, although on paper the constitution says that it should be somebody who is selected by the majority of parliament.

Then we have 14 days to form a coalition, get a vote of confidence. How sort of comfortable are people in Warsaw and across Poland feeling today that this good news will translate into a good result in the coming weeks, or by the end of the year?

Górnicki: I think there is understanding that they'll do what they can to prolong this process and to use this extra time and push those deadlines to the maximum in order to prepare different straps, in order to still take some money out of different companies.

Winter is coming for them, and they have to somehow control it. Although it's still unclear. We may be surprised, of course, maybe the president will just nominate actually the opposition. It's very hard to judge.

Historically, only on a couple of occasions, I mean our president, Andrzej Duda, he has, let's say, did something against the party, which he represents, which is Law and Justice.

So, I think this will be a surprise if he suddenly would say, okay, I understand that it's pointless to nominate a PM from Law and Justice because this person anyhow, will not get a confirmation vote in the Parliament. So, it's just wasted time.

But I think at this stage, I would be leaning towards that he will still do it. We mentioned four parties here. So, the winning Law and Justice, the three liberal opposition parties, the Civic Platform, or the Civic Coalition, the third road, and then the New-leftist, Nowa Lewica.

And then there is the Konfederacja, Confederation, which consists of more far-right people. But even this Confederation doesn't want to enter any coalition with Law and Justice, plus, even if they were to, they still don't have enough votes together to do this. So, it's just going to be like waste of time.

It's not going to be easy, first of all, right now, it's for the opposition, they know how much they got. So, that will probably transfer into how many ministers you get, which of the key positions. So, it's not going to be a process that boom, two days, and it's done.

Jakub: Yeah.

Górnicki: We have to also remember that President Andrzej Duda will remain in power and basically for two more years, slightly less. And he has the right to veto according to how the Polish political system works. If he vetoes it, then if he vetoes it and the opposition doesn't have enough power, they would need 270 something votes.

So, it's going to be a process, when I think the expectation would be that the President would be rather, well, not helping, I would say the government, let's put it this way, diplomatically.

Jakub: So, zooming out a little bit to Poland's role in the region, which is quite significant. I mean, this is Poland as a motor of the European union's economy. It's the sixth biggest economy, and it's been growing for almost uninterrupted, if not for COVID for over three decades.

So, this is an important country. It is at the middle of the three Cs initiative of building infrastructure in the east of the European Union, which I would say is de desperately needed.

And if you want proof, just try to visit Prague, Warsaw, and Riga on the same two days, it's not that easy. The connections in the whole region are pretty poor, and there's a pivotal role for Poland there.

And then most importantly, I guess it's about Ukraine. Poland is the logistics hub for the war in Ukraine. Konfederacja, I think, threatened openly, not so openly that they're going to make life difficult for Ukraine, blocking the airports in Rzeszów, the station in Przemysl, and other things like that.

Well, how do you see sort of Poland's role in the region going forward, especially towards Ukraine, where it's playing such an important role?

Górnicki: Okay, so before I jump to Ukraine, quickly on EU, but I think this will be the starting point for the government. It'll change for the region one thing, up until today, first of all Poland and Hungary were vetoing things in EU.

And I think, it would drastically change things for Viktor Orbán because he doesn't like to be the only person to veto things. Then he could come back to his people and say, okay, look, it's not only us, it's also Poland blocking things. So, it's different.

Right now, it's going to probably going to be only him. So, this will change a rapidly for him. Although we've had also a change differently in Slovakia with the Prime Minister Fico coming back, which is very much openly anti-Ukrainian.

But in the so-called crat states, I think Poland going back into more pro-European course will be something which will play a very important role. And this will for sure transfer into the relations with Ukraine, which started off when the Russian invasion began.

And I think the first year they were just like a poster relations when it comes to a country in need and a country which is helping. But as the elections were approaching, it was easier, for example, to sneak in those anti-Ukrainian sentiments, different narratives.

There are unfinished, unresolved issues between Poland and Ukraine given the history. And that is always this window which allows those actors, whether they are domestic or foreign, meaning Russian here, to misuse them in order to spike them up.

And we've seen a lot of those activities, especially last in between two months. Law and Justice adopted a lot of anti-Ukrainian rhetorics from the Konfederacja. They noticed that they were losing some voters, and Konfederacja was gaining them running on this largely anti-Ukrainian agenda.

And that, of course, was sparked by the crisis when it comes to the Ukrainian grain, how the government mishandled it. And this is where opposition was already saying last year that the solution, which the government proposed was bad, and that it is going to be … in a way the government implemented it, will very soon lead to problems on internal Polish market.

And this happened, and that turned to be ugly. What happened around the UN summit in New York, President Zelenskyy, our prime minister. President Duda actually tried to save the situation, and it seemed that they managed to negotiate something, when the next day Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, Polish Prime Minister came out and basically said something again, anti-Ukrainian government. And after this, it kind of stopped, but it was-

Jakub: So, just to clarify, this is the statement about Poland not delivering weapons to Ukraine. I mean, they were purposely provocative, I think, people defended Morawiecki. What he said was that we are not currently delivering weapons to Ukraine.

But the point was not that, the point was to make a sound bite that would go around and kind of say that, look, we don't have to be friends. Don't disrespect us.

I'm wondering, you mentioned sort of the three members of the coalition, the most interesting one from this perspective, I think is Third Way, because it takes a lot of this historically PSL, which was an agrarian party, and it has a very agrarian base. Is that sort of the weak member of the coalition that PiS can potentially target to take things apart?

Górnicki: No, no, no. Because they understand that they actually received an extra vote from people who are afraid that they're not going to make it to the parliament. I know many people personally, who are like saying, okay, I would vote for this party, but damn if they don't enter the parliament and the whole thing collapses and the Law and Justice stays in power.

I don't think that they're going to break because they will not have life in politics for sure, if they would rebel. Plus, everybody knows how Law and Justice treats its coalition partners.

Jakub: So, that's quite interesting. The reason that I'm thinking about that is Ukraine entering the EU, which is sort of where the long-term perspective is here, is very disruptive for the EU, just given how big Ukraine's agricultural sector is.

Górnicki: Yes.

Jakub: And directly, it also impacts Poland because a lot of the-

Górnicki: Well, it affects many countries in EU, it's France, so it's not only Poland.

Jakub: And so, I'm wondering whether this will be — because there will be challenges ahead. And there is the previous government that was run by the same people as are now in the coalition, the opposition coalition was to a large extent brought down by, in my opinion, Russian Special Service Operations.

The secret recordings of politicians in restaurants, and there's been multiple sort of reports that have intelligence services fingerprints all over them. That desire to have Poland fail, have Ukraine fail, is still there. Right?

Górnicki: Of course.

Jakub: Where is it going to target, that's kind of my question.

Górnicki: I mean, first of all, even this scandal which you're mentioning, it was never properly actually understood. And I don't think Law and Justice had any interest in actually making it understandable for the people, because there was a big chance that, hey, we have to tell people that we are actually in power because of some Russian intelligence operation.

That was many reasons. We have to be also fair that in 2015, a lot of people were fed up by the Civic Platform, and they've had a really bad campaign. They also have been in power back then for eight years, and they've been simply used and kind of Law and Justice when I was looking at their campaign, it really reminded me of that. And then it just tired, arrogant, disconnected from people.

But I cannot compare the level of this arrogance to what was happening in 2015 with the Civic Platform. Those are two totally different dimensions.

Now, just going back slowly to Ukraine. So, I think first of all, the, I'm going to say opposition because they haven't yet formed the government, and that's kind of easier, I have to switch my mind. They would not sacrifice Polish-Ukrainian relations just to get some extra votes. I think this is the difference between liberal and illiberal opposition.

The second thing, I think one of the things which is important for the new government is to use this opportunity which was created last year to finally resolve all the issues quickly between Poland and Ukraine. Those historical things, have both sides address it, because I think this is a window, if it's going to be left open, Russians will always use it, always.

And frankly speaking, Poland has this PiS protest between Poland and Germany after 1999. Just journalists involved, think tanks, different institutions. And if Poland was able to somehow resolve things with Germany, the problems between Poland and Ukraine are nothing compared to those.

And I think this is really important, which is those holes in our history, they have to be really fixed. Given how much willingness is there towards this, I think from Polish people and from Ukrainian people.

And I'm not saying here politicians, because that's unfortunately different problems for some politicians, it always would be tempting not to do it because then they can use this in their agenda and so on.

And even using this moment right now where Ukrainian politics, although slightly more active in recent months than last year, it's still I think a good moment where I would really use this opportunity to just say, okay, if we want to go into to the next level, which is needed for many important things, which is A, helping Ukraine join EU, B helping Ukraine join NATO, and then C, once this goes, help Belarus also achieve democracy.

But there it going to be much more complicated. And Ukraine entering EU is a problem on a couple levels. First of all, it's a big country, so the number of votes and so on. And if Ukraine would enter EU, it would allow Eastern Europe to be actually very active, when it comes to votes and so on.

So, I think this would make this shift that EU would be more balanced in all dimensions, south, north, east, west. Right now, France and Germany, given their population and population gives you power when it comes to votes in the parliament and so on. So, that's the first thing.

Second figure is there will be challenges, I think, to the very important voting groups for many countries, but it's only a question how you tackle it. I think, if you create programs helping, and I've recently read that there were some ideas how to help the Polish farmers to prepare for this situation.

When at some point Ukraine is joining EU, even if it's fast-tracked, we are talking couple years away also, one thing is to join EU, but then EU has those different levels of-

Jakub: It's a process, yeah.

Górnicki: Of joining when it comes to … and so on. I think the current opposition understands the importance of Ukraine joining both EU and NATO, that this is a super goal for pollens security, but it's not going to be easy for certain parts of Polish society.

Jakub: So, just to double down on that and maybe sort of, I think that's also a good place to wrap things together. It will require social change on both sides. And you've travelled to Ukraine extensively before the full-scale invasion, and especially after many of the Outriders journalists are there, were based there, let me put it this way. What do Poles not understand about Ukrainians? What do Ukrainians not understand about Poles?

Górnicki: I may actually not have the most popular opinion here, but for me, what I was thinking, especially during the first days and first weeks of the war, is that both Polish and Ukrainian society send a signal to politicians saying, our requires are not that important, and just stop this shit, solve it. When it comes to really big issues, we are here to support each other.

And I think that is something on what we have to build. When it comes to understanding, I think right now we actually understand quite well, very well. I mean, there's so many Ukrainians in Poland, less of course, than it has been last year.

And a lot of Ukrainians have come back to Ukraine. Some have left to different countries, but a lot has stayed probably for longer. In my daughter's class, 20 pupils, three of them are from Ukraine, for example, currently. So, that gives you an idea. There was more last year, a lot of them have return.

So, I think the fabric of the Polish society has changed. And I think, unfortunately for Ukraine, a lot of those people will stay for longer. For example, here, especially when you have kids and those kids start to integrate, develop friends, it's much, much harder for parents to relocate back and so on, once a certain level of integration.

When it comes to understanding, I think, it's a matter of inter interpretation of certain facts. And I think always the best concept here was EU always, these days we look at EU as the, like money pot, whereas EU was invented, the money was not the goal. The money, the joint market, was a mean to stop the conflicts in Europe.

And that was, I think, the beauty of it. And I always hope that you'll be more talking about its original vision than just the financial side of it, because then it just becomes numbers.

Whereas it's all about solidarity and helping the different divides created, especially by the Second World War in many European countries being under Soviet rule or communist rule for many years.

I don't know. I mean, there is nothing super specific here. It's just about confronting those facts from two sides, being open, being able to respect the other side, look on it and then saying, okay, this is what you think, this is what I think. Let's digest it on both sides, and let's not jump emotionally just because someone said something like this.

I think different sites have different looks on certain things. One is vowing, the second thing is for Lviv, the sentiments towards Lviv. Polish society, and which is used always by Russian saying, “Poles, they want the Lviv back.”

So, it's about confronting this and it's different like saying, okay, yes, Lviv is today in Ukraine, but hey, once upon a time, it was an important centre of Polish intelligence and so and so on and so on.

And just adopting those two things. I always say it's really funny, one of the joint facts is that the first football game for Poles and Ukrainians is the same game. So, that's maybe a good starting point, sport as a uniting field.

And the other way is just finding those commonalities rather than things will divide, as a good starting point.

Jakub: Certainly, an optimistic sort of message. I imagine that's going around in Warsaw, this optimism these days. Jakub, thank you so much for joining us on Power Lines.

[Music Playing]

Górnicki: Thank you for having me. I'm always a huge fan.

Jakub: Thanks so much for listening to Powerlines: From Ukraine to the World. To find more podcasts like Power Lines, look up Message Heard wherever you're listening to this podcast, and find us on our website, messageheard.com or on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook by looking up at Message Heard.

You can also follow the Kyiv Independent on Twitter and Facebook at Kyiv Independent and Instagram at Kyivindependent_official to get the latest news and stay up to date with our coverage.

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Season 2 Episode 1

[Music Playing]

Jakub: Hello and welcome back to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World, a podcast from Message Heard and The Kyiv Independent. I'm Jakub Parusinski.

We're back now for a second series of Power Lines analysing the context and reverberations of the war in Ukraine.

But before we get going, some quick housekeeping. I personally have a new role at the Kyiv Independent. As a co-founder of KI, I'm always looking for new ways to research, analyse, and understand what is happening behind the scenes in Ukraine.

So, recently I've been setting up KI Insights, a research institute that will explore in depth the issues around the war, but more importantly, behind the business of rebuilding Ukraine.

To learn more, check out insights.kyivindependent.com. And for those who tuned in last season, you'll no doubt be wondering where my co-host, Anastasiia Lapatina is. Well, she now has her very own podcast, which is called This Week in Ukraine, and it is absolutely the go-to place to get on the ground reporting on the war. Make sure to tune in. New episodes drop every Friday.

So, this season of Power Lines is just going to be me, but I'll be interviewing some of the most important writers, thinkers, and policy makers to explain the biggest stories going on behind the wall. And don't worry, I'm sure that Nastya will be making a guest appearance down the line as well.

But in today's first episode of season two, we're going to be looking at an event that if it happens, could have enormous implications for the war, but even more importantly for how Ukraine developed as a country in the years to come.

And we're talking about the Ukrainian presidential and parliamentary elections in 2024. Basically, the situation is like this: Ukraine was supposed to have a parliamentary election in October of 2023, and the presidential one in the coming spring.

But the country is in the middle of a war, and its constitution says that a vote cannot be held under martial law. The situation isn't quite so black and white, though. There are certain ways that the constitutional court could essentially push through an emergency or unconventional kind of vote.

But that window of opportunity is narrowing. For example, the president is not allowed to dismiss parliament in the last six months of its term, which ends in August of 2024.

So, if the vote isn't held relatively soon, there's a chance that it won't be held for a long time. The war, after all, could go on for quite a while.

On the other hand, holding a vote under the current circumstances is incredibly challenging. There's the question of how you get people on the front lines to vote, what to do with the refugees, and just in general, how you ensure the security and integrity of the vote on the day.

So, Ukraine is faced with an impossible choice. On the one hand, it can continue a stable but bad situation for potentially a very long time. And it is bad. The level of trust in deputies is incredibly low, and there's scandals popping up all the time.

Or it could take a incredibly risky gamble in the hope of bringing in new, fresh faces with both a democratic mandate, but also the energy to put the country back on track in terms of reforms and drive towards joining the EU, joining NATO, and fulfilling all of those goals that Ukrainians have been fighting and dying for, for the last 18 months.

So, that's a really tricky situation, and I don’t know what the answer is. We'll be digging into these questions and more today and to help us with that is our first guest of the season, Anatoly Oktisyuk.

Anatoly is a political scientist who has been working in the Ukrainian political scene for the past decade. He knows how things are run on a granular level, and he's currently working on that at DemocracyHouse think tank in Kyiv.

I spoke with him at our studio at the Kyiv Independent offices to really get a sense of if these elections could and indeed should happen. But that's enough for me. Let's get straight into it with Anatoly.

[Music Playing]

Hello everybody. Welcome back to Power Lines, season two. Today we'll be talking about the potential Ukrainian elections that may be or may be not coming up. And I'm very pleased to have with us in the studio today, Anatoly Oktisyuk.

Anatoly, can you tell a little bit about yourself and your background in the Ukrainian political space?

Anatoly: I’m political expert. I'm working in DemocracyHouse think tank. It's a analytical organisation based in Kyiv. We analysing political competition in Ukraine, state decisions, war reforms, oligarchs, everything which connected with the politics. We are trying to communicate reforms and explain what is going on in Ukraine.

Jakub: Perfect. So, just in terms of a bit of background, Ukraine had its last elections in 2019. Zelenskyy famously came to power in a landslide winning very big in the parliamentary elections, in the presidential elections, primarily on an agenda of deoligarchization, fighting corruption and peace with Russia.

So, we can see that obviously didn't turn out how we expected, but it's interesting to know that the person who has stood up and is essentially running the war, I would say in a very decisive way was the person who came in on a platform of peace.

So, it's now sort of close to five years. Ukraine's constitution mandates that there are elections periodically. The presidential elections, I believe, are already overdue. The parliamentary elections should be coming up, but because the constitution also forbids having elections during martial law as now, the elections are not going to happen. Right?

Anatoly: Right. According to our constitution, we are still restricted. It's impossible to have elections, but in Ukraine everything is possible. So, this is the key message of our podcast, I guess.

Jakub: Okay, good. So, essentially, we do have something to talk about. So, that's important to say. So, when was the presidential election supposed to take place?

Anatoly: Next year, March 2024 and parliamentary election this October 2023.

Jakub: Okay. So, that did not happen. So, let's maybe start with what would be the reasons to have elections, even though in theory they can't be held?

Anatoly: Why do we need elections? Elections, it's a key for democracy. We need elections for democracy, for reshuffling of political allies, for making new governments, which has big credibility and big public and international legitimacy.

Jakub: And so, there's a couple of things here. So, one is legitimacy abroad. And there is some questions from foreign partners asking when the elections will be held, how quickly can they happen?

There's also the legitimacy inside the country. So, there's a couple of things that we need to unpick here.

And then, at some point it's also quite important, like if it's not now, then when? But let's take these one by one. So, in terms of the international side, what do you think the Ukrainian leadership is hearing now from the international partners?

Anatoly: Well, the key issue is yes, the elections and the preconditions for these elections, because for foreign partners, the key issues are if you would not run elections next year, then what you're going to do if this conflict would run for several years more.

Jakub: Yeah.

Anatoly: Well, if you're not conducting elections next year in 2024, what is your plan? So, this is the first issue.

The second issue is that all these things are connected with international financial and military aid. Because for some political western leaders, elections in Ukraine, this is the also windows for peace negotiations.

Jakub: Okay.

Anatoly: Because it's very important, because honestly, yes, you are right when you told that Zelenskyy won previous local parliamentary and presidential elections as a president of peace.

But as a president of peace, he was not really efficient, and his political popularity was reduced significantly. So, he lost his rates. And who knows what happened with Zelenskyy if Russia would not invite to Ukraine in 2022 in February.

Jakub: I mean, his ratings were considerably falling before the full-scale invasion. But I'd like to come back to something that you just mentioned, which is that this could be a window to open up peace negotiations.

So, Zelenskyy, he came in as the president of peace, but since then he's made a lot of personal commitments to victory. So, he's sort of personally committed themselves. Is there a sense amongst some of the international partners that if other people come to power, this essentially opens up room for-

Anatoly: Yeah, this is the option, this is the floor for the new quality of policy in Ukraine. Because it is possible that some not really hawkish political forces may come to the parliament. We don't know, but it's the opportunity.

And otherwise, this is the also chance for making new quality of the politics in Ukraine, especially in the parliament, it's a chance to make more professional government, because probably you've seen this official letter from White House about the reforms in Ukraine. That cabinet of Zelenskyy should accelerate the reforms in Ukraine.

And this is the big — among American partners if they can do it, because it's directly connected with the amounts of financial and the military aid. So, if you are more efficient, if you're more transparent, if you're more self-confident in fight against corruption and the oligarchs, so you'll receive more.

So, because if you have much more strongly institutions, if you’re supporting fight against corruption, it means that everything is going in right way in Ukraine.

The key issue, if this war will run for several years more. So, what then you're going to do with this?

Jakub: Yeah. So, let's come back to sort of what are the arguments to hold the elections now? So, one is that there's a new parliament. One question is that perhaps they're more open to peace negotiations, which we do know that certain Western partners want.

There's a second thing which is we're bringing in new political forces that are maybe not connected to the oligarchs. So, a cleaner or more professional parliament.

And then there is the question of, well, how do we deal with this time issue? Because if it's not next year, if it doesn't happen in the next couple of months, when can it happen?

So many things nowadays in Ukraine seem to be conditioned on when the fighting ends. So, we have these discussions, Ukraine, and NATO, when the fighting ends. Ukraine and EU, when the fighting ends. Ukraine reconstruction, all the investment and everything, when the fighting ends.

And so, there is a very strong argument that look, you can wait, but at some point, it will need to happen within some kind of military conflict.

What about the situation for Zelenskyy and his team in itself? Is it better for them to have this faster rather than later? 

Anatoly: Yes and no. Again, so everything is possible in Ukraine with elections. For my opinion, one of the key precondition for upcoming elections is connected with military successes of Ukrainian Army.

Let's imagine if Ukrainian Army will liberate Melitopol next year, spring 2024, society will receive big patriotic push. Everyone will be happy. Then Ukraine will increase negotiation positions with Russia.

Because if you will come to Melitopol, honestly, will help the situation when Russian forces will be kick out to Crimea, then we will have a chance to attack Crimean infrastructure.

I remember when we liberate Kherson, when Ukrainian army liberates Kherson, it was huge patriotic flesh in the society. It was big uprising; big patriotic moves and the society was ready to do everything even for war. So, he need military victory.

Jakub: Yes. So obviously, people would want to see some kind of results that Zelenskyy’s policies have been successful. What about the question of there's the economy, which has rebounded to some extent, but it's not great. Life in Ukraine is difficult right now and it's probably going to get worse before it gets better.

There is the question of sort of the state capacities and the administrative apparatus that he has. What about those issues? How do you think they figure into the presidential administration's calculations?

Anatoly: It’s a very huge and tough issue for our government because if you take a look on our draft budget, 2024, more than 50% of our incomes is in dependence from Western partners. So, we are expecting to cover all this budget deficit with external financial aid. According to the forecast, we need 52/53 billions U.S. dollars.

Jakub: Just to cover the budget gap.

Anatoly: Yes. Because what we are making, our incomes we just cover in military expenses and that's it. And the rest of the financial aid we need for functioning of the state in Ukraine, 52/53 billions of U.S. dollars. So, it's huge amount of money. So, this is the big dead work for Zelenskyy.

The third reason, so we are talking about the economy and the military. It's kind of preconditions for potential elections. This is internal legitimacy of the Zelenskyy because a war is always unpopular scene. So, we-

Jakub: Especially when it goes on for a long time. Right?

Anatoly: Exactly. Because it's full-scale war. And yes, got Western partners supporting Ukraine, but we spending more and more resources, especially human resources, especially economic resources.

And for our government, it's also important to understand when they will receive opportunity to reward internal political outlets. I mean parliament and the government because they're also quite toxic, so-

Jakub: So, let's pause for a second because I just want to clarify that a little bit. So, one of the important things is that for now, well, Ukraine is very dependent on Western aid and that aid continues to be renewed, but it's being renewed for now.

There's elections coming up in a lot of European countries, Poland just in a couple of weeks. There's a lot of elections in the West as well. And most importantly the U.S. towards the end of next year.

So, we don't know how long that aid will continue afterwards. Let's say there's a Trump presidency, the funding stops, holding elections in 2024 will seem much better than holding elections in 2025. So, there's that perspective.

And then on the other side, and I think this is really interesting to unpick, we have a problem with the current elites. And to what extent is sort of Zelenskyy happy with them, how much does he want to actually change the parliament itself?

Anatoly: Zelenskyy, he's unhappy with this parliament. And he's unhappy with this government because he believes that all these guys came to the power with his popularity. They're not working very hard. They're not loyal.

This parliament is really toxic for Zelenskyy, and he really wants to reshuffle them because another problem there is no mono coalition formally, it's still existing, but in fact there is no mono coalition.

They're not loyal because there is group of Kolomoisky, there is group of Razumkov, Former Speaker of Parliament, affiliated with … there is a big amount of still pro-Russian forces. There is opposition.

For Zelenskyy, this is a great opportunity to reward parliament and government to win this election because his political opponents, they would not have enough instruments to be successful, let's say on the elections during the martial law.

Jakub: So, tell me a little bit more about that, because this is very interesting. So, Ukrainian elections, as in most countries, they're quite expensive, time consuming, a lot of energy needs to go into them.

In the past, these elections, and different political parties as well as individual deputies have been sponsored by various oligarchs mostly.

Anatoly: Right.

Jakub: And also, by Russia, who now has the resources?

Anatoly: I said there are only two forces who has own resources. It's just Zelenskyy party. Because it's a ruling party. They have enough instruments for gathering money. because they controlling everything in Ukraine.

So, they have lots of businessmen who may cover all these expenses. And former President Petro Poroshenko, he's also oligarch. He has enough own-

Jakub: Famously a billionaire himself.

Anatoly: Yes, yes, yes. He has enough own resources to cover all these expenses. For the rest of the parties, yes, they was connected and affiliated with the oligarchs, and now oligarchs are restricted.

They don't have medias, they don't have possibilities to finance. They don't have free resources, and they're trying to save rest of the resources what they have now.

But at the same times, if you're going to have elections during the martial law, or let's say another war conditions, new political parties will have a chance to make a new party, organisations and to receive support directly inside of the society.

[Music Playing]

Jakub: So, how do people feel about the elections? Do you think there's public support at the moment? 

Anatoly: I think no, there is no public support for the elections because our society is still believing in the military victory of Ukraine, that Ukraine will defeat Russia and liberate South, liberate Ukraine because it was also the part of our Ukrainian state propaganda. It was the part of the policy of Zelenskyy.

He pushed this narrative that we liberate or occupy territory until end of 2023 or until 2024. People still believe in Ukrainian victory because they see Kherson, they see successful counteroffensive in Kharkiv region.

Ukrainian society believing in so-called Wunderwaffe. And first of all, it was HIMARS, then it was Patriots. Now we are expecting for ATACMS, then we expecting for F-16 and so on, so on.

The society believes that if we receive so-called super powerful weapon from the Western partners, it would help us to liberate more and more territories.

So, until we have this hope in the society, we believe in the military victory. Then we will see if this so-called Wunderwaffe doesn't work in the future, then society will start to think, “Okay, what then?” So, this is the first issue.

The second issue is that Ukrainian society is still ready to suffer and ready to give mandate of trust for Zelenskyy I think until end of the year or until maybe 2024.

But Office of the President, they also monitoring temperature in the society, if they see that society is unhappy. I know the society unhappy now because the man, they’re restricted to go abroad. There is big poverty, there is high prices on everything. Our government is planning to increase prices for utilities, for electricity and so on, so on.

War is always unpopular. It's almost two years and people getting unsatisfied with this current situation. And if people will be really unsatisfied, and if we see that this Wunderwaffe doesn't work, if we don't see military so-called success, so then-

Jakub: Then people will become angry and in a sense for the presidential administration right now, that-

Anatoly: Legitimacy of Zelenskyy will decrease.

Jakub: Will decrease. And then I think there's a lot of potential negative consequences. I think, let's jump into them in a second. But essentially for them it's a question of if they wait too long, the situation might get even worse.

There is a little bit of a window of opportunity. Yes, they have to hope for some kind of victories, some kind of positive news in the short-term, but also in the long-term, not lose too much because there's a lot of hardship coming in the month and the years ahead.

Let's talk for a moment about what the counterfactual here is. Why wouldn't the elections be held? And essentially what are the difficulties? So, what are the big challenges to sort of holding elections in the current circumstances?

Anatoly: Well, for my opinion, the biggest concern for Zelenskyy, this is the political legitimacy of these elections inside of Ukraine. I mean, from the rest of the political elites because according to my information, I have lots of friends, MPs from the opposition parties, Petro Poroshenko, Yulia Tymoshenko. In other political parties, they may ignore upcoming elections.

So, this is the one of the potential risks for the Zelenskyy that some political parties, they will ignore it.

The second scenario, of course, it's issues connected with the security because we don't know what kind of intensity of the conflict would be in Ukraine, high or low.

Another issue, from my opinion may be solved, for instance, if there's Zelenskyy saying that few millions of Ukrainian refugees are abroad in EU, I think European partners may solve this problem very easily.

European officials may arrange the voting stations everywhere where Ukrainians are settled. So, it's not the problem to receive the ballots and to settle the polling stations in city halls and everywhere.

Jakub: But then let's go to the bigger challenge. What do you do with the soldiers who are on the front lines?

Anatoly: So, then it's a big issue. I think this is what our government would like to use the tool of electronic voting.

Jakub: Okay.

Anatoly: So, it’s the Diia application.

Jakub: I was about to ask, Ukraine has this famous super app where you can have your passport, your banking, you can even watch some media-

Anatoly: State in the smartphone.

Jakub: Yeah, everything. Perfect phrase, state in the smartphone. So, do you think it's reasonable to expect that Diia will be used for electronic voting?

Anatoly: I think so. And this is what Zelenskyy is interested to implement, this electronic voting. But the problem is that for using this instrument, you need fix this in the constitution. We don't have in our constitution possibility to vote via electronic way or by post.

Jakub: And realistically, Ukraine will need both.

Anatoly: Yes, we need both, because this is the chance how to interact people in voting process. I mean, in the frontline, it would lead for increasing public legitimacy of these elections because some part of Ukrainian population would not trust for electronic voting and especially opposition that would not trust for this posting.

Jakub: But just to push on that point as well, the legitimacy of the elections will be challenged. Ukrainian is so politicised now that you have so many enemies all around the world who will challenge what is happening in the elections.

So, Russia will challenge, there will be a lot of propaganda. There will be a campaign against it anyway. So, you do need some kind of preparations to say, “Look, the elections were legitimate, here are international observers. Here was the process that we ran them.”

Is that something that the Western partners are concerned about as well? That electronic voting cannot be monitored as easily? I don’t know if they have the technology or there isn't that much experience with this. Is that also a problem for electronic voting?

Anatoly: That’s a problem honestly, because we never tested it before. We never used it before. But again, for these elections, we need political review of Zelenskyy.

Jakub: Okay.

Anatoly: Because if we would say, he will say, “Okay guys, we need these directions because it depends, from these elections we depending for amounts of military aid, financial aid, Western partners is making pressure on us. This is the issue of surviving of the state.”

Jakub: Yeah. So, there is a precedent for finding a way out, but there's no perfect solutions here. There's only lesser evils and ways forward.

I wanted to turn a little bit towards what could be the result of the elections if they were to be held within the next sort of six months. You mentioned already, I think it's quite apparent that Ukraine has become a more militarised society. To what extent is the military a block that will show up?

Anatoly: We don't know. It's really too hard predict because post-war or so-called war society, they may be split on two sides because one part of the society may vote for peace parties.

Another part of the society may vote for so-called militarised parties or would say more radical or hawkish political parties. And we don't know which camp will receive more support.

Jakub: Does it feel like that's being prepared right now?

Anatoly: Yes. Big preparation is going on. And I mean, the problem is that the political parties, they're not trusting for the Zelenskyy. And if he's saying there is no elections, there is no chance for the elections. They key political players, keeping in mind this possibility for potential elections in 2024.

And they're preparing. They are trying to keep the team. They're trying to watch some analytical activities. They are monitoring political attitudes, conducting sociological posts and so on.

According to the sociological posts, there is big, big popularity in Ukraine have Valerii Zaluzhnyi.

Jakub: He's the head of the armed forces. And he's the sort of prime candidate that everybody talks about as a potential challenger to Zelenskyy on the one hand, or somebody who would form a political party.

Anatoly: He is Ukrainian Mannerheim or Charles de Gaulle. So honestly, because now we have a big request from the society for fair and transparent man. So, from the majority of Ukrainians Valerii Zaluzhnyi, he's the guy who is self-made man. He don't have any offshores. He's not affiliated with the oligarchs.

He's the guy from the army with good reputation, respected on the West. But again, on the martial period, he don't have a chance to participate because he's restricted by current legislation.

Jakub: So, essentially what we have, and I think this is something that's quite interesting to deep dive on a little bit, is that we're seeing that the president's camp is kind of preparing for these new political forces by creating its own alliances with similar parties, but that are friendlier to them.

So, should Zaluzhnyi or somebody from his team, or somebody who's sort of politically close to him launch military party, you've got the defenders of Azov style which is a closer to the president kind of military party, which is being set up.

I mean, a lot of their media presence in let's say the recent months suggest that, okay, something is being set up here. There's a little bit of a campaign happening. Do we see other directions like that?

Anatoly: On the beginning, our podcast we mentioned on so-called peace parties who declaring the peace, now we see Arestovych project.

Jakub: Yeah.

Anatoly: So, he is also affiliated with Office of the President. And this is also possibility to use this trend for peace. Because if I'm 100% sure that in new parliament we would not see honestly pro-Russian parties, because they will be banned.

Jakub: And yet there's a big block of people who are formerly, let's say, not pro-Russian, but more Russia minded kind of-

Anatoly: Right, Russia minded, or they supporting peace with any concessions from the Ukrainian government, or they're ready for peace, for any scenarios. Just give us peace and that's it.

Jakub: And so, you've got Arestovych who was quite prominent and next to Zelenskyy for a long time. Now I think it's a little bit more distant. He would be one of the people to lead a party that would soak up those votes.

So, we've got the military, we've got the pro-Russia, or sort of the Russia affiliated, Russia minded kind of camp. Who else is there?

Anatoly: Then Razumkov.

Jakub: Okay.

Anatoly: Razumkov, of course, he is not declaring that he's pro-Russian, but he is the party of pigeons.

Jakub: Okay. What does that mean?

Anatoly: Pigeon party, like he blatantly may support the peace on any conditions. Of course, he's pro-European, pro-Western, Razumkov. But at the same time, he's supporting interests of big business, let's say, Rinat Akhmetov, Vadym Novynskyi, it's potential party of reconstruction of big business in Ukraine.

Jakub: Okay.

Anatoly: Of industrial reconstruction.

Jakub: That sounds quite a bit like a lot of the other East European populist parties that are close to big business, they prefer to be in the west because it's more convenient. But at the end of the day, they're not really ideological, they're just about-

Anatoly: Yeah. It's so called Ukrainian Republican Party. He's supported by big capital. He's also supported by Moscow Church because he's very close to Vadym Novynskyi. He may be successful.

And in this camp, I will put also Yulia Tymoshenko. Despite that she is the longest living political party in Ukraine who always represented in the parliament. Yulia Tymoshenko may be successful again, this is for my opinion, she may pick up electorate of party for life.

She will use social narratives, I restore pensions, restore social insurance to decrease tariffs and so on, so on. Sometimes even before the war, she used so populistic narratives, which is sometimes I am like, everyone likes something for free especially if you're talking about the pensioners, 10 millions of pensioners in Ukraine. You should remember about this.

Jakub: This is incredible, by the way. I mean, Ukraine is a country of let's say 40 something million. The numbers keep jumping around.

Anatoly: Yes. And 10 millions of pensioners, like my parents, my mother, she is school teacher. And she remember good times when the Yulia Tymoshenko was a prime minister.

Jakub: Yeah.

Anatoly: So, it was the really wealthy period 2005, 2008, 2010, when we had the great economic situation. And Yulia, she's the person who may make a deal with Putin. If Tymoshenko will come and say, “Okay guys, so I know how to solve the conflict. I know Putin, I will meet with him, and we will make a settlement. And the war will be over.”

Jakub: Okay. So then, so we've got the old players, we've got sort of the Russian speaking camp, the disoriented camp, the military camp. Is there a space also for the regional authorities? Ukraine has had this long debate about federalization, is there room for a local party?

Anatoly: 100%. 100%. There is room for regional elites. They always trying to be represented in the big politics because they control in regional political landscape. They have resources, worker resources, and we have also small regional oligarchs, big farmers, big regional businesses who trying to invest in the work areas.

So, potentially Vitali Klitschko may play the role of the leader who consolidate the interest of regional mayors and regional elites.

Or at least if Vitali Klitschko would not run for upcoming elections, his young brother, Wladimir Klitschko, former boxer, he'll participate in these elections as I know he has ambitious to participate. And he is the liberal candidate, could be one of the potential alternative against Zelenskyy.

Jakub: And Wladimir Klitschko has the advantage of being both a new face and being recognizable, with-

Anatoly: The Germans, Americans, they come to Kyiv despite the meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy or British, they're meeting with Brothers Klitschko because they see them as one of the — who may interact with another opposition political parties.

Jakub: That's very interesting. Speaking about this need to sort of change the faces and bring in new people, there's a lot of people who are currently in power who will most likely not be in power if the elections come up.

And there's a lot of people who expect that they will no longer have a future in Ukraine. Is there a threat for some of the people to decide to collaborate with Russia?

Anatoly: This is actually what Russia expected to do, because in one of the interview of Budanov says that the Russian intelligence, they just accommodated huge amount of cash to distribute cash in the bags, and to buy the reality of the officers apparatus everywhere, everywhere.

But it doesn't work. It doesn't work. I mean, otherwise, despite all these corruption scenes in Ukraine, the good and positive scenes that we have very efficient infrastructure, anti-corruption infrastructure.

Despite all the scenes, they are working and they demonstrating good efficiency. We have a good hope that we are moving forward, and we are trying to reduce all this corruption.

Jakub: Okay, very good. Anatoly, thank you so much for joining us today. It was absolutely fascinating to hear and to speculate on what can happen. We've got elections coming up everywhere, in Europe, in the U.S. and even in Russia.

And if there's one thing that we've learned over the past 18 months, it's to never take anything for granted. Even those elections might have some surprises for us. Thank you so much for joining us on Power Lines.

[Music Playing]

Anatoly: Thank you for invitation. Many thanks for our audience for listening us.

Jakub: Thanks so much for listening to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World. We'll be back in two weeks with a new episode on some other pivotal elections in Eastern Europe.

But these ones are definitely happening, the elections in Poland on October 15th. The polling shows that it's currently on a knife's edge, so whatever happens, we'll be digging into what the results mean for the future of Ukraine.

To find more podcasts like Power Lines, look up, Message Heard, wherever you're listening to this podcast. And find us on our website, messageheard.com or on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook by looking up at Message Heard.

You can also follow the Kyiv Independent on Twitter and Facebook at KyivIndependent and Instagram at Kyivindependent_official to get the latest news and stay up to date with our coverage.

And if you're interested in more in-depth analysis of the reconstruction of Ukraine, be sure to check out insights.kyivindependent.com.

Now, fair warning, this is a subscription product, but we'll definitely try to make a lot of interesting content available to the broader public. You can support the Kyiv Independent on our Patreon, or by going to our website and clicking the support button.

Season 1 Episode 12

Power Lines Season 1 Episode 12 Transcript

[Protest Chants]

Participant: Sometimes I look at some old photos or remember something that happened before February 24, and there is always this feeling that this is some past life. It was such a long time ago. Now everything is different, and it will never be the way it used to be.

Jakub: February 24th, 2022, it's one of those dates with a chilling quality whenever you say it.

Participant: I was at my apartment in a Kyiv suburb, and around 5:00 AM I woke up to explosions.

Anastasiia: For months before we'd seen the photos of troops in the borders, the satellite images of tanks and planes. We heard the denials too. The rumours of 72 hours until Kyiv would fall, and then the bombs.

Participant: I called my mom who lives in Bucha to tell her that the war had started. She was already up and had heard the explosions too.

Anastasiia: The world has been reeling ever since.

Jakub: This final episode of our first season of Power Lines falls a year on from Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. So, to market, we reached out to some of the people you've heard throughout this podcast, both in Ukraine and among the diaspora. They've sent us some reflections about that day and the 365 days that followed.

Participant: Just the day before the invasion. I left Kyiv to take my dog and cat to my parents in the western part of Ukraine because I anticipated for something to happen, although I didn't actually believe that Kyiv or other Ukrainian cities would be shelled. But I wanted to be prepared to be useful for my country if anything should happen.

Participant: I sat at my desk to quickly send an email to the editor of the Opinions section of the Washington Post. That day, I was meant to file a story about my take on Russia's build-up on the Ukraine's border as a native of Donetsk, a city Russia occupied back in 2014.

So, I contacted the editor saying that the story had just gotten outdated with all-out war starting. And while I was waiting for his response a Russian missile just landed next to my building. My walls shook, and car alarms went off. I rushed to the balcony to take a picture of the smoke. That was my immediate reaction. My hands have never shaken that much.

Participant: I planned to return to Kyiv the next day, but Kyiv was under the shelling. Around 5:00 AM I was woken up by a friend who was looking for someone to take his wife and their cat out of the city. And then all sorts of things were happening.

I have very few recollections from the last days of February 2022. Everything is blurred. As I often say, in those days, all of us did everything everywhere and for everyone.

Anastasiia: Across the globe, people woke up to a world transformed and the country disfigured. For the Ukrainian diaspora, this was terrifying.

Participant: Early in the morning, I was looking at my computer. I was scanning social media.

Participant: I was in London in my flat, working on an article that I was meant to submit to a newspaper by the morning. It was 3:00 AM in London. When I started to see reports of explosions in Kyiv appear on my Twitter feed.

Participant: I was at university at Stanford, in the U.S. watching Putin's address on my laptop.

Participant: I was awake. I was in New York City on my couch in Brooklyn, following what was happening on Twitter.

Participant: I was trying to stay in touch through my aunts and my cousins with family in Ukraine, in Chernobyl and Chernivtsi. And I was in a state of shock, I think, as were many people.

Participant: And I watched the reports live on Twitter of Russian bombs being hurled at Kharkiv.

Participant: And the first thing I wanted to do, as soon as I heard those words (I tear up just thinking about it), is call my dad, who didn't know what was happening.

Participant: I was reading the reactions in the middle of the night from friends in Ukraine, just completely heartbroken, just an immense sense of grief and anger.

And this is what I tweeted at the time, I wrote, “I have too much rage to fully express how I'm feeling. Everyone who downplayed Putin's terrorism, who rationalised his mass murdering mafia state, you enabled Putin's war as much as the governments finally passing sanctions needed years ago.”

I captured my instant reaction, just a white hot fury. And that grief stayed with me, like a very intense grief. And it's still there. It's still constantly in the background of my thoughts. I pray for Ukraine. I pray for my family and friends there every day. I have to.

Participant: As the days unfolded, there was that mix of panic and concern until, thank God, we got news from family in Chernivtsi particularly, that everybody was alright.

Participant: One of the first things I did was to call a dear friend who had gone to Ukraine a couple of weeks earlier in anticipation of the escalation of the war and wake her up. I struggled to find appropriate words to wake her and tell her about the full-scale war.

I remember saying, “Wake up my dear, it’s started. It was one of the hardest things to say. I really hope that the day will come soon when I'll be able to phone her and say, “Hi, my dear. We have won.”

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: The international community could only look on, feeling impotent so far away. But for those in Ukraine, there was only time for action.

Participant: I grabbed my go bag and left my place.

Jakub: Anna was in a district of Kyiv that came under fire. Her priority was giving herself to relative safety any way she could.

Participant: There was no option to get a taxi or to use public transport. The traffic was already insane, meaning it just froze. Cars weren't moving at all.

So, the only option remaining was for me to walk in the direction of Kyiv, as I live in a suburb. So, I was walking, and while walking, I received a call from a relative living in Donetsk, crying. She was saying that she couldn't believe that this nightmare (meaning Russian invasion), had happened again.

Jakub: Anna was picked up by a colleague at a petrol station in Kyiv and spent the night in the bomb shelter of a relative. People talk about this time as a kind of fever dream, but now those memories have turned to anger and anger that has solidified.

Participant: We may never be able to laugh like we used to, or just be happy. The Russians took too much from us. And I'm not sure if we would ever be able to heal the wounds of loss or fill the gap left by the deaths of our loved ones.

It is worth saying that the feeling of fear vanished during this year, and it was entirely replaced by the fury.

After all, unfortunately, so many wonderful people have died during this time. The best people of our country. These people could have built and developed our country, but they are gone, and no one will replace them. Wonderful people die every day. We cannot afford to lose the best. That is why we yearn for victory so much.

Participant: Because of family and all, I've never really worked on anything that's so deeply personal. And all I can hope for is that Ukraine can flourish and build a state and society that Ukrainians deserve out of this.

And in that we need to think about the post-war as much as we need to think about winning this war. And we need to start thinking about the post-war now.

Anastasiia: Last year, people used to ask how many days, months, or even years, the war would continue for. They asked each other whether Kyiv would fall or how much of the country would be chopped up and butchered in Putin's colonial project. But now, a year on, people talk only a victory.

[Music Playing]

Participant: It's been a year of war. And I think that above all, I'm so proud of us. Again, people gave us three days, and we're at 365, and I don't know if there's going to be an end in sight this year, but Ukraine will all be Ukraine again.

Participant: We're going to win. We're ultimately going to win. This is the Holodomor again, but this time Ukraine has western tanks. This time, Ukraine better be getting serious long-range missiles and fighter jets.

This is a time for the world to correct itself and to give Ukraine all the help and support it needs to rebuild into a strong, independent, dynamic democracy. Ukrainians have made history, and for that, that victory belongs to all Ukrainians.

Participant: They hope that Russia's war against Ukraine will end by the end of this year with Ukraine's victory. By victory, I mean liberation of all Ukraine's territories, including Donbas and Crimea.

By victory, I also mean the responsibility for Russia in a form of a special tribunal for the country's war crimes committed in Ukraine against Ukrainians.

Jakub: So, what have we learned? What can you take away from destruction on this kind of scale? Well, every person we reached out to this week spoke of pride. A country changed, yes, but one that has never been more sure of itself than it is now.

Participant: I feel very proud to be Ukrainian. Over the last 12 months, the people of Ukraine have endured so much, but did so with such resilience and dignity, with so much love for each other and their country.

Participant: We, Ukrainians have changed a lot during the last year. We've become so much stronger and confident in ourselves and our victory. We realised how strong we can be, how quickly we can respond to the problems and challenges. And I guess that we've learned to do the impossible.

This year has hardened us, and I'm sincerely proud of all Ukrainians who work every day for victory, who fight on the front line, who volunteer, and who fight against the internal enemy on the home front. I always knew that we were a great nation, but I didn't know to what extent.

[Music Playing]

Participant: I feel relieved that Ukraine has finally appeared on the mental map of the world. I feel saddened that it took a full-scale war for this to happen. But most of all, I feel hopeful that after so much suffering, Ukrainians will see victory and justice and lasting peace before long.

Anastasiia: It feels fitting in the bleakest of ways that our final episode of the season should fall a year after the full-scale invasion.

Jakub: But where do we look now? To the end of the war, to Ukrainian victory? Sure. It's useful to hold on to tangible gains to trace the lines drawn on maps as they creep back eastward. But the intangible marks will remain.

Anastasiia: The psychological impact of war stretches out in all directions at once. Every Ukrainian has lost someone or something. Future leaders and activists, artists and creators, future mothers, fathers and children, homes decimated by Russia's bombs and others left behind or lost in between.

And more than anything, time, this is not something we can get back no matter the reparations, trials or justice.

Jakub: Right now, we don't have the luxury of counting what's been lost. But it will come, the time to rest, process, grieve and reflect, and to rebuild Ukraine as a country and an identity.

Anastasiia: From Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent, you are listening to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World.

Jakub: In this series, we're going to be mapping the undercurrents and global consequences of the war in Ukraine, beginning in Kyiv and following the roads out wherever they may lead. I'm Jakub Parusinski.

Anastasiia: And I’m Anastasiia Lapatina.

Jakub: This week is our final episode of the first season of Power Lines. It's also the one-year anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. So, we wanted to end this season by looking to the past and to the future.

Anastasiia: It's also the second in our two-parter on rebuilding Ukraine. And today we're looking at the psychological toll of the war and how Ukraine plans to rebuild its national identity in the years to come.

Jakub: I honestly can't believe that it's now been a year. How do you feel?

Anastasiia: Yeah, it's strange. It's very bizarre because I remember distinctly back in April or May, I think it was, a few of my friends were thinking that we might go and spend some time in Lviv.

But I remember my friend being like, “No, I don't want to go because I want to be in Kyiv for victory day.” Because that was around the time when we pushed the Russians out of Kyiv Oblast and everyone was so jubilant and everyone was so sure that a few more weeks, just a few more weeks and we're going to be done.

That he literally didn't want to go. And he stayed. And I remember having those conversations and waiting just a little bit, just a little bit. And now here we are. It's weird.

Jakub: Yeah. A day becomes a week, becomes a month, becomes a year. It just sort of grows on you.

I had this conversation, I think in the first days of the war with a couple of people who basically reached out to help fundraise for Ukraine, for Ukrainian media. And they asked me sort of what did I think, how many days, weeks would it last? And I just shrugged, I don't know, six days, six months, six years. Who knows?

Anastasiia: Yeah. I also remember thinking just kind of the fact that we're never going to have a normal again. Even after we win, there's still going to be a huge change in society, a huge change in insecurity, especially in the East, whatever that will look like.

So yeah, it's really difficult to wrap your head around how much your lives have changed, especially on an individual level.

For me, my entire life plan has changed because of this war. What I was going to study after grad, what I was going to work in, where I was going to live. I had a completely 180 different plan, and here we are. And all of those goals that you had before February 24th just seem completely irrelevant now.

Jakub: It's crazy how much this is something that is irreversible, right?

Anastasiia: Yeah.

Jakub: The damage that has been done and the consequences, all throughout. And it sort of cascades. It changes the way that people think, the way they plan, the way they behave, the way they talk. And then it sort of goes out through all of these details.

And I think about Israel and when flights will resume to Ukraine, will it be the same as with Israel? Will it be a case that there's a special aisle in the airport and you have to show up three hours or four hours in advance, not just two or an hour, and you'll be questioned and double checked because you're entering a territory of perpetual conflict, perpetual war.

Who did you speak to this week, Nastya?

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: Well actually, this is someone who we've been wanting to speak with for the whole series, as his work on how countries and communities come back from the trauma of war, mass violence and rapid change is some of the most fascinating in the field.

So, Eugene Finkel is a political scientist and historian, born in Ukraine and raised in Israel. He's currently a professor at John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

He's the author of multiple books on history and political science, including Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust. And he has two upcoming books focusing on Russia and Ukraine, including Bread and Autocracy Food, Politics, Insecurity in Putin’s Russia, and the incredibly timely To Kill Ukraine.

We were really excited to speak with Eugene to situate the current atrocities in their historical context. And to see what lessons we can learn from the past as Ukraine seeks to rebuild psychologically as a nation.

Hi Eugene, thank you so much for coming on.

Eugene: Thanks for having me.

Anastasiia: So, we're going to be talking a lot about the war in Ukraine and how we're going to deal with the trauma and the reconciliation part and the memory after we win the war. And you studied the World War II and the Holocaust specifically, you've studied genocides.

So, I want you to start with that and ask you, what is the appropriate definition of genocide? How should we define it? And looking at the war right now, would you say the war in Ukraine fits that definition?

Eugene: Well, the definition is one, and it has been set up for us by the United Nations Convention on The Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide from 1948.

And here the definition of genocide is very simple, acts committed for the intent to destroy an ethnical, racial, national or religious group as such, in whole or in part.

And it also gives us a list of actions that constitute genocide together or individually such as: killing members of the group or causing bodily harm or creating conditions that make a group's existence impossible. Or even transferring children from one group to another.

So, if you look at the Convention, and it is my view, and my view is not a consensus view. There are people who disagree, but my view is that threshold for the declaring the genocide has been met, I think it has been met long ago. And we are just getting more and more evidence supporting this view.

It's pretty clear that there is an intention to destroy Ukrainians, not as an ethnic or religious group, but more as a national political community.

And we also see quite a lot of violence below on the ground, such as killing civilians, targeting civilians, transferring children from one group to another. That's probably the clearest evidence that right now we have to meet the definition because people can be killed for many reasons that might be crime against humanity or atrocity crime or war crime.

But when we look at transfer of children from Ukraine to Russia and their adoption by Russian families with the explicit goal of bringing them up as Russians, that clearly does fit the definition though we still have to have to connect the dots and to see how this rhetoric of destroying Ukraine as a national group. And this intention that does clearly exist at the top, how it translates to actions on the ground.

And I do believe that we have enough evidence of genocide already. I look at it as a social scientist, as an historian, I look at the entire event.

For lawyers who will be tasked with prosecuting people and putting them in jail for the crime of genocide, obviously, the bar is much higher because they need to prove that the intention to destroy a national group was present in people's action. And it's much harder to do so.

And I agree that from the legal point of view, for individual cases, it'll be much more challenging, maybe even impossible.

Anastasiia: You probably remember the article, which kind of pumped up on Russian news side, what Russia should do with Ukraine, where it was essentially like a blueprint for the genocide.

Would that be used as evidence of proving intent? Since it is a state news outlet, there is no way that that could be posted without some sort of sanctioning from the people above the Kremlin, let's say.

Eugene: Definitely. And this article and articles and statements like that on social media, on various Telegram channel, that’s exactly what we need to prove, intent. And there is no argument about intent right now.

It's pretty clear that this rhetoric is genocidal, and the intent is there, the challenge is to see how this intent is translated to violence.

Anastasiia: I see.

Eugene: On the ground. And where the people who are doing the killing, who are doing the shooting are driven by the same intent. So, to connect what's going on, on the ground with the intent, that has been proven in my view pretty clearly.

Anastasiia: I see. So, in other words, it's not necessarily super clear that the articles and the political statements have been heard by the soldiers who are killing civilians in Bucha or if they received the same instructions, right? So, there can be this gap there.

Eugene: Exactly. So, if there are instructions, or even if they read those articles, so even if they know those views, those views are the ones that are driving their behaviour. So, the fact that this stuff is being published or has been published by the Russian media, you said, only strengthened the case for labelling it a genocidal campaign as a whole. But again, it'll not be enough to put individual perpetrators in jail.

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: Jakub, do you think there is a disconnect between the intention of the Kremlin and what is being told to Russian conscripts on the ground? Or what they're thinking? Do you think all these hundreds of thousands of soldiers pouring into our country are actually there to eradicate the nation and stuff like that?

Jakub: I think yes, there is a little bit of a disconnect. What you have to remember is that Russia, as most post-Soviet countries, has a lot of apathy. And people just sort of disregard whatever is the political messaging.

I think the conscripts on the ground are basically told that they need to run west, and if not, they're going to be shot. Certainly, that's what a lot of the messaging that we're seeing on Twitter and Telegram of the mobiki as they're called, sort of complaining about their situation.

But that doesn't change the fact that throughout Russia, throughout the military indoctrination and across the nation, there is a huge portion of people that see Ukrainians as not quite people.

As a problem to be solved as a malfunctioning type of Russian that has to be eradicated, purified. And the language is that of genocide, of Nazism, of absolute barbarity. And that carries, yes of course, throughout the country to a huge part of the population.

Anastasiia: Yeah, totally. I think they're carrying out the orders and the orders are criminal, and those are war crimes, it's genocide, et cetera. So, it's clear what's happening, regardless of what the soldiers are thinking.

Though, a lot of them are very brainwashed, which is why Ukrainians are pushing back against this broad narrative of victimisation of the Russian people and Russian soldiers. Because when we listen to intercepted calls that are released by our military intelligence services, and we hear what these guys are saying over the phone while they're calling their mothers and wives, et cetera, it's not nice stuff.

They're not saying that “Oh, I don't want to be here because I love Ukrainians, and they're actually great and screw Putin.” No, no, no, they're wilfully admitting to raping women and killing civilians and saying that they stole a bunch of shit from someone's house.

It's the total norm for them. I don't hear any remorse other than fear for being killed. But I listen to these pretty often and I haven't heard a lot of genuine remorse in any of them, so-

Jakub: No, that's a voice that is definitely quite quiet and missing. Basically, you can be against the war, you can be against people dying in the war, or you can be against your country being a colonial empire.

And I see relatively a lot of people being in the first two categories. I don't think that there aren't that many in the third one. And outside of the front lines, all over the world, I don't hear the dialogue of how to decolonize Russia with Russian voices there.

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: Definitely not.

Anastasiia: Now let's talk a bit about the Holocaust. And I'm of course in no way equating the tragedy that happened with the war in Ukraine, but I think it is one of the most well-known examples of a horrific genocide that people often evoke here.

And I want to talk about reconciliation that happened post-World War II and the steps that Germany took to kind of rehabilitate itself and continues to take, because I think broadly speaking, Germany is seen as this kind of success story, especially if compared to Japan, for example. It is just a normal European progressive country by now.

So, I wonder how they got there and what were the steps they took to kind of make it right after the war?

Eugene: Right. So, when we started this conversation, you started with talking about reconciliation after Ukraine wins the war. And that's, I think, the crucial part of the puzzle.

There will be no reconciliation, certainly no forgiveness unless and until Ukraine wins the war. And this future of memory and relations between Russia and Ukraine will obviously depend on how the war ends.

If there is no clear Ukrainian victory, and if there is no clear admission of guilt, then no reconciliation will be possible and no historical justice will be possible.

So, that's part one. The necessary step of what happened to Germany, it has been defeated, it has been occupied, it has been humiliated, dismembered, partitioned. And that was the foundation upon which this reconciliation could have been built.

Now, I don't want to sound too cynical, but people also have a very rosy view about Germany's post-Holocaust trajectory when it comes to memory and when it comes to reconciliation and apologies.

And if you look at what happened in Germany, actually up until 1960s, very little has been done. There was the famous Chancellor Adenauer's apology, which was very watered down.

There were reparations. But other than that, there was very little accountability. Almost no perpetrators were punished besides those at the very top in the Nuremberg trials.

Germans preferred not to talk about what happened. It was a non-issue, both in Germany and in relations between Germany and others.

The real work began only in 1960s when time has passed. A new generation grew up, Germany finally started persecuting and putting on trial perpetrators, although, once again, only a tiny fraction of perpetrators faced justice. And even those who did by and large received minimal punishment, or no punishment at all.

So, after that, after 1960s, 1970s, and especially as this generation of perpetrators started to die out and fade out and lost their political prominence. That's where the real contrition and the real soul searching began.

Anastasiia: Interesting.

Eugene: But we're talking about a very long period, and that I think in the best case, what will happen in the case of future Russian-Ukrainian relations.

I actually had different, very interesting conversation with some Ukrainian politicians, especially local leaders. And I ask them, “Well, how long do you think it will take for future reconciliation?” And the replies that I got ranged.

So, first of all, it depended on how exposed the community was to violence. So, for instance, Vadym Boychenko, the mayor of Mariupol, when I asked him this question, when we were going through those years, his calculus was between 80 to 100. So, maybe only four plus generations will be able to forgive.

Other people who were less exposed, who came from communities who were less exposed to violence, gave smaller numbers. But even those were around two to three generations. So 15, 16 years.

I think that reconciliation can happen earlier. I think people will forget, not forgive and not forget, but try to go and find out some way to work together with Russia, because Russia after all is not going anywhere.

So, in terms of what can be done, there are no magic solutions. The only way to do it is a long process of reconciliation, asking for forgiveness. But also, education. And that should come from the Russian state and from the Russian society.

So again, we're talking about starting teaching children to accept responsibility and also to view Ukraine as a different state, and Ukrainians as a different people who are entitled to their own decisions.

But we're talking about the very long process, no magic solutions, unfortunately.

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: Yeah. Let's talk about Germany.

Jakub: Yeah. Let's talk about Germany. So look, I'm Polish, my daughter is Ukrainian. Yeah. You start from a difficult place. And in a way I feel really lucky because I think I'm the first generation of Pole that doesn't have to be brought up in I would say this vivid fear of Germany and my generation didn't get that emotional baggage handed over.

Anastasiia: Interesting.

Jakub: How long will it be for Ukrainians to be able to come back to normalcy with Russia?

Anastasiia: Now, imagine if Russia doesn't attempt. So, imagine how many more decades on top of that we're going to put. And I'm not completely pessimistic about it either.

I do believe that there are people in Russia that have a brain. It's a very, very small minority, but there are people who are aware of what's happening and who are going to try to do what they can to save their nation from this catastrophe after the war.

Jakub: The thing that sort of strikes me as — because we're talking about basically how do you live with the genocide as a part of your identity, as a part of your memory?

And it feels to me like there is a radically different situation between living in a post genocide society, which has been brutalized, harmed, but which is on a path to recovery, and one where the danger is still present and will continue.

Anastasiia: Yeah.

Jakub: And I was thinking about sort of how do you educate children? How do you bring up children in this kind of world?

And I have a two-year-old, she's starting to have lots of opinions, and this is the moment that sort of the personality is starting to form. And in a normal world, you would start by trying to help your child build skills and discover what they like and grow as a person, develop as a person.

And if that child is Ukrainian, and I'm sure it's the same thing for children who are Jewish or from a range of other nationalities that have suffered genocide. You start that conversation with something like this, “There are monsters in the world and those monsters want to harm you. And from the very beginning of your existence, a huge part of your life will be about protecting yourself from those monsters.”

There's a reason that Ukrainians call them orcs because these are orcs that are literally crossing the border. And if the war stops tomorrow and Russia doesn't change, that's still a conversation that I'm going to have to have very soon.

As part of her entry into the world, she needs to discover that there are monsters who want to kill her and her family and her cousins, and her uncle and her baba and her dada. That's something that her life will never escape.

Anastasiia: And that's something she doesn't deserve at all. And also, even if regime change does happen in Russia, we're still going to have to tell this to our kids. This part of our identity I think is never going to change.

I don't see a world, no matter what Russia does, in which Ukrainian children are not brought up with stories of their families fighting in the big war that happened decades ago.

Jakub: Yeah.

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: So, this is fundamental. There is no escape. It's everywhere. Russian atrocities are everywhere.

Let's move towards the view from below, let's say. So, we kind of talked about how Germany tried to rehabilitate itself and what Russia can do. But I'm also really interested in how and how the Jewish people remember that experience and what they do with this memory and how the events of the Second World War and the events of the Holocaust changed their kind of national psyche and national identity.

I wonder if we can draw some lessons from that for what can potentially happen with Ukraine.

Eugene: So, I don't think that there are lessons that can be drawn, those things will happen one way or another. And obviously Ukraine after the war will be a post-genocidal society and post-genocidal societies are going through those traumas for generations.

And we’re actually just now started to discover how durable those traumas are, even on the individual level. So, we know that experiencing large-scale violence changes not just the victims themselves, but also, their descendants, their children, their grandchildren psychologically, but also on a genetical level.

Anastasiia: Oh, wow. I didn't know.

Eugene: So, and with that, the Ukrainian society will have to deal with. Now on the reconciliation level, obviously there will be a lot of negative attitudes towards Russia and Russians. And I think that is inevitable.

And I don't think that no amount of Russian apologising will change that, those attitudes will remain. It doesn't mean that there will be no working relations between Russia and Ukraine. But on the individual level, this resentment and those traumas will be there.

So, if you look at the history of German-Jewish relations, no matter how many times Germany apologised, if you talk to those of the victims of the Holocaust, who's still alive and even their children, you will hear this resent.

Not among everyone, but there will be those reactions. I know people who even in 1990s and 2000s refused to go to Germany, refused to speak German, refused to buy German products.

It stays with you on the political level, it stays with you on the social level. That's not even talking about the economic destruction caused by the war or the experience of the refugees, which is also extremely, extremely traumatising. Genocides don't stop when the killing is over.

Anastasiia: Of course, a big part of this kind of national anger that Ukrainians have is rooted in this idea that Russians absolutely must pay for what happened, pay both literally financially via reparations, but also through trials and prosecutions of everyone who we can get our hands on that were involved in what happened in Ukraine, in the crimes against us.

So, I wonder, what do you think that could look like? Do you envision some sort of something like Nuremberg trials? Do you envision something else?

Eugene: So, realistically speaking, when it comes to people who need to face accountability at the highest levels, which is Russian military and political leadership, I would love to see Putin on trial.

Anastasiia: Me too.

Eugene: In Kyiv, in Hague, in Moscow, anywhere else. I very much doubt it'll happen. And even if you look at what the International Criminal Court has done, it is working very slowly. It is working on a very small number of key cases.

So, it's not that we're going to see large-scale, high-profile trials being conducted by international organisations or international body, such as the International Criminal Court.

What can happen though, what is moralistic is of course internal Ukrainian prosecution of war criminals that the Ukrainian justice system and law enforcement can get their hands-on.

And it's already started with several cases that have been tried in Ukraine. It's important to have those people punished, but it does nothing to punish those who ordered this war and who are in charge of prosecuting it the way it does.

My biggest hope is that the key accountability push will happen in Russia by Russian courts because for practical reasons, that's where most perpetrators are and will be located.

And second, it is an essential component of changing the psyche and reconciliation. Without that though, and right now I'm not very optimistic, most Russian perpetrators will never face justice. And that just the sad reality of this war.

[Music Playing]

Jakub: So, I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on this, Nastya.

Anastasiia: Which part?

Jakub: Basically, Russia will do what Russia will do. Let's leave that aside for a second.

Anastasiia: Yeah.

Jakub: Whatever happens, Ukraine needs to rebuild itself as a society. How do you see Ukraine changing over the next 5, 10 years?

Anastasiia: I think the government must capitalise on the huge spike in patriotism and nationalism, if you will. And the interest in our culture and our literature and our music and our clothing, whatever that may be, our history.

I think the government really must seize on this initiative by average people who suddenly wear the Vyshyvankas every day and listen exclusively to Ukrainian music and who are really interested in their heritage, the government must start pouring in money into this sector.

I know this may seem something that is not the most important thing that comes to mind when you think about destroyed cities and housing problems, but this is really important. This is what this war is all about, it's our identity.

And we really have to enrich it now because we also had, and perhaps continue having, but on a lesser scale, the problem of apathy. And I think that is a huge problem because right now people, because of the war, have gotten suddenly more political as rockets started raining down on their houses. And this transformation in their psyche is a very good thing.

So, I think we have to keep it from kind of going backwards again. I think our society is going to be so much better. There's going to be so much more hope and solidarity, but again, that also depends on what Eugene said. This also depends on how the war ends.

Jakub: I'm really curious to see how Ukraine will sort of evolve as a place of different ideas and concepts and way of living. And the reason I'm thinking about it is a lot of the people who are returning to Israel or ended up living on a kibbutz or in some kind of community, or there was this sort of lots of different micro communities thriving within Israel that were accepting the people returning to the country in their own way.

Although there was also a lot of tension between the Jews from Europe and the Jews from the Middle East on account of the people from the Middle East thought that, “Why didn't you fight?” That was a big question, which will also come back in a Ukrainian context in a way. Right?

Anastasiia: Oh, 100%. It's already showing up.

Jakub: There will be questions about how did you approach this and what were you doing? But I'm also thinking Ukraine, I remember when I first arrived and it was just the 2000s, this was a place where so many religious and philosophical communities were thriving.

You had the Hare Krishna kind of people running around, Buddhists, Protestants. Lots of missionaries were coming to Ukraine because this was this kind of atheist, largely atheist space, post-Soviet where you could try to get people to join you.

And Ukraine has this vibrancy of ideas and communities. So, I think it will once again become a birthplace of different ideas and ways of life. That was my optimist part.

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: Yeah. Both of us are trying really hard here to pull up the spirits. Do you think victimhood will become a central part of Ukraine's identity? Or if it is already and what may be the consequences of this? Because I feel like those kinds of identities almost ignore the state agency in some situations.

Eugene: So, I'm not sure whether it'll become the essential part of Ukrainian identity, at least in the long-term. It'll definitely become the key component of Ukrainian identity in the short-term, and it will become an integral part of Ukrainian identity moving forward, decades and possibly hundreds of years from now.

But not necessarily the key defining part, again, will depend on how the war ends. If the war ends with Ukrainian victory, then this experience of winning the war might overshadow the experience of victimhood and will become the more important component of Ukrainian identity.

But the victimhood and the suffering, of course, will not go anywhere as well.

Anastasiia: And what do you think happens if Ukraine doesn't end up taking back all of its territories, given that the latest polls show that like 85%?

Eugene: I think it's less about territories than about how Ukraine perceives the end of the war. If Ukraine decides that victory is absolutely 100% necessary with taking back all the territories, including Crimea, then of course it's about territory.

But if as a result of some internal dialogue or some other decisions, Ukrainians decide that actually victory means something else rather than territory, just surviving the war, or going back to borders of February 24 for taking Donbas, but maybe not Crimea, that's what the victory will be. That's the internal Ukrainian decision.

Right now, it's pretty clear that victory means taking back all the territories, including Crimea, but that does not have to be so. No, it's not set on stone.

Anastasiia: Of course.

Eugene: The definition of victory and the perception of victory, it's a result of what Ukrainians decide victory is.

Anastasiia: But I guess my question is more like, it's going to look pretty catastrophic in terms of internal stability if the outcome that we end up having is different from what the absolute majority of the state expect. The resentment is going to be poisonous.

Eugene: No, of course I'm not disagreeing with you that right now victory means taking all the territories back. And I do agree with you that unless and until it happens, you will have a heavily militarised, heavily traumatised Ukraine that will not be able to move on from this experience.

And this is a very dangerous existence for everyone, first and foremost, Ukrainians, because they need those resources to go to reconstruction rather than defence.

Anastasiia: Yeah, true.

Eugene: Rebuilding the healthcare system and the education and rebuilding the country rather than building tanks, weapons or preparing for the next war against Russia.

So, I absolutely agree with you that right now, without taking all the territories back, victory is not possible and normal existence is not possible.

But if Ukrainians decide under some conditions that victory means something else, for instance, just surviving as a nation or as a state, then that's what will allow them to move on. Right now, it seems inconceivable, but it's also not impossible.

Anastasiia: Thank you again. Eugene was really, really interesting to listen to you.

Eugene: Thanks, Nastya.

Anastasiia: Jakub, what would it take for you, if anything, to start some sort of process of reconciliation with Russia as a country and with Russians generally or individually?

Jakub: It's hard to imagine something that would really change the approach with Russia other than essentially seeing leaders emerge who would start the process of decolonizing Russia and who would challenge the narratives, not in a anti-Putin way, but in a genuinely trying to rethink what the country is about.

And that's something that's difficult. I do see it on the individual level, by the way. I do see people who are trying to find a path towards that, but on the country level, it's hard to see something without that process going on.

Anastasiia: For me, my approach is similar. I am open to having discussions with, I don't know, a friend from the past or a friend of a friend who is from Russia or somebody who is from Russia, but immigrated to the U.S. like decades ago.

So, I don't have a problem with talking to Russians on an individual level, to Russians who have appropriate opinions.

However, I don't see myself going to Russia anytime soon or ever for that matter. And I don't see myself kind of publicly endorsing something that, for example, a new Russian government is going to do, or-

Jakub: It also feels like a political impossibility for-

Anastasiia: In a way.

Jakub: I'm sort of looking at the people that I know, and again, as I said, I've been very fortunate that everyone has suffered in some cases quite severely, but these aren't the worst cases.

And I think we all know who we’re talking about, the worst cases, people whose loved ones have been killed in front of them, who have lost their sons or daughters who have lost their parents.

I think it's going to be almost politically impossible to start the reconciliation until the moment that people who have been on the front lines and who have suffered amongst the most are ready for that reconciliation.

The way that that will happen, and hopefully it will happen at some point, but is that somebody who has been a prisoner of war from Asov or who has seen their parents or children die after a decade or two will stand up and say, “Okay, now I'm ready to forgive.”

And until those people are ready to forgive, I very much doubt that there will be a large movement, anything more than exceptions, really meniscal exceptions of people who are ready for a process of reconciliation.

Anastasiia: Yeah. I think that's an excellent point. I actually didn't think about this, but now I feel like since my family is doing relatively well, we were affected, our village was occupied and things like that, but everyone's alive. Nobody died.

So, I'm hugely privileged, and I almost feel like it's not my place to forgive, who cares if I forgive? The Russians and the world should care about families of those who died and families of those who've been tortured. Those are the important people in this reconciliation process.

And I think I don't see myself publicly being okay with working with Russia, incorporating with Russia. I'm going to give space to those who were affected more.

Jakub: But I wouldn't necessarily want to sign off this first season of Power Lines with claiming that a pessimistic worldview is sort of what defines Ukraine. I'd almost say that it's the opposite.

Over the past year, we've seen Ukrainians show incredible resilience and creativity in expressing themselves and connecting to the world. And I would almost say that's the more Ukrainian perspective on life that we should take away.

And what I've found, and to maybe bring a bit of optimism to this is over the last couple of years, perhaps even decades, it feels like the world has been becoming a little bit more pessimistic about the future. We're all looking for how the world can collapse.

Whereas actually, if you look at the statistics in many ways, poverty is at some of the lowest levels, crime is amongst the lowest levels. Education is rising. And yes, there has been a downturn against democracy in recent years, but there are reasons to be hopeful.

And I think in a world that has perhaps become too introspective and too gloomy about where it's going, I think the way that Ukrainians have stood up is a reason to be hopeful.

And as we've seen on Power Lines, it's something that impacts all aspects of the world where it's economic, social, political, we're all connected.

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: That is probably the right way to wrap it up. We hope you've enjoyed this first season of Power Lines. Tune in next week to hear our final bonus of the series where we recap some of our favourite episodes.

We'll also be doing Twitter Spaces on the Kyiv Independent Twitter account in the coming weeks, so look out for it.

Jakub: If you want to further support us, you can subscribe to our ad free feed on Apple and by looking up Power Lines + on Spotify.

You can also support the Kyiv Independent by finding us on our Patreon to get behind the scenes content. Go to patreon.com/kyivindependent to continue helping us report on the most important stories in Ukraine.

Anastasiia: Look up Message Heard wherever you are listening to this podcast for more of our original shows and find us on our website at messageheard.com or on our Power Lines, Twitter @PowerLinesPod, as well as Instagram and Facebook by looking up at Message Heard.

Jakub: You can also follow the Kyiv Independent on Twitter and Facebook at Kyiv Independent and Instagram at kyivindependent_official to get the latest news and stay up to date with our coverage.

Please also subscribe and rate Power Lines in your podcast app as it really helps others find our show.

Anastasiia: Power Lines is a partnership between the Kyiv Independent and Message Heard. It was produced by Bea Duncan, Harry Stott and Talia Augustidis. The executive producer is Sandra Ferrari. The theme music is by Tom Biddle and Alfie Godfrey.

Bonus Episode 11

Power Lines Season 1 Episode 11 Bonus Transcript

[Music Playing]

Jakub: Hello, listeners, welcome to your bonus episode of Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World.

Anastasiia: As we close out this season of Power Lines and approach, a year since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, we wanted to do a final Q&A.

Jakub: So, we asked you if you had any questions about post-war reconstruction in Ukraine.

Anastasiia: We got a lot of interesting questions, but before we get into that, I wanted to answer one that comes from CXiminez13, “Are we not putting the cart before the horse? Basically, should we even be thinking about rebuilding right now?”

Jakub: I actually think that it's not too early. In fact, I was recently talking with a faculty member from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Oleksandra Tkachenko, who was talking about basically the lessons from the rebuilding of the Netherlands and specifically Rotterdam city that was famously destroyed by a Nazi bombing before World War II. It looked somewhat like Amsterdam, and now it's a modern city with nothing from the old city left.

And essentially, they started to plan the reconstruction of Rotterdam immediately after the city was bombed. I think the new architect to organise that was hired within four days.

And you have to remember that the war had just started. It was moving across the Netherlands and into Belgium and then France. And they couldn't have known it at the time, obviously, but there were still five years to go.

But one of the reasons that Rotterdam is now seen as one of the examples of how to rebuild, how to do urban planning for the reconstruction of a city is because they started early. It's a huge effort. It takes a lot of planning, a lot of thinking.

So, hopefully peace and Ukrainian victory will come soon, but in the meantime, there's a lot of people who need to think about rebuilding the country.

Anastasiia: I totally agree. And I also think that such early preparations and plans being developed and announced, while this may not be obviously as important as the practical considerations, but they have this kind of soothing, comforting effect.

Because I think that if all the news that you're constantly reading about is new attacks, new developments on the frontline, the war may really seem endless. As this ongoing year after year after year kind of tragedy. And it's just really difficult to live through this, as you know, of course.

So, I know that when I see something like, oh, this ministry developed a plan to reconstruct this, it really brings hope to me, and it comforts me. And I remember that this will end in one day. It has to, and when it does, there will be a lot of work, and it will be positive work. It will be about rebuilding and reconstruction and bringing life to places that were destroyed by Russia.

Jakub: That's actually very hopeful. And yes, it does really matter.

Anastasiia: You're genuinely surprised that we managed to say one good thing on our podcast.

Jakub: Let's be honest, it hasn't been sunshine and roses every day.

Anastasiia: No, no.

Jakub: But there's a light at the end of this tunnel.

[Music Playing]

So, most of the questions can pretty much be boiled down to how the hell are we going to pay for this? For example, someone with the username, GEG, asked exactly that and suggested perhaps a tax on Russian gas oil or mineral exports.

Anastasiia: Sharon Jackson also similarly asked, “Do you expect Russia to pay all reparations. This is going to be interesting. It'll bankrupt them for decades,” she said.

Jakub: Well, I'm a little bit pessimistic. I don't necessarily think that there's much in terms of legal mechanisms that can actually be used to force Russia to pay reparations.

That doesn't mean that the assets that have been seized will not be transferred to Ukraine, that would be criminally negligent, if all of those assets from the Central Bank, the oligarch, et cetera, that have been seized in the West, don't go to Ukrainian reconstruction.

But that probably won't be all. And Russia should pay reparations for this. I just don't really see how we can do that.

Anastasiia: I think one of the ways that we can do that is imagining what peace with Russia will look like. Because when this war ends, there will have to be a body of legislation that writes out the conditions for this ending of fire and moving forward.

There may be a situation there where Putin is no longer a leader. I know that may sound crazy, but also that is one of the possibilities that when the war ends, Putin is no longer the leader. And then the free world and Ukraine ends up signing a peace treaty with Russia basically on our conditions, and we can write whatever we want in that document.

And that can be as well reparations because it's pretty obvious that the entire world is going to rally behind that cause with us, these reparations are essentially key to rebuilding this.

Jakub: So, that would be the way to go. And I have to say, there would be something symbolic about taking an Ukrzaliznytsia train wagon and forcing the Russian representatives-

Anastasiia: Oh, my God.

Jakub: To come in and sort of sign an armistice in a forest just north of Kyiv.

Anastasiia: In liberated Mariupol or something.

Jakub: Yeah. But I think there's sort of two risks to that kind of scenario. One is that if it is Putin or somebody close to him, a continuation of his regime, essentially, that is still in power, I think they might just not admit defeat.

Even if they lose, they'll say, “Look, this special military operation was a huge success. We have now denazified Ukraine all the way back to our borders and we're fighting against NATO when representing the Global South.” And it'll be completely delusional. But they will essentially deny everything including reality, and there won't really be peace, right?

Anastasiia: Yeah. That is also a possibility.

Jakub: And then the other thing that is also a risk here is coming back to the train wagon example. So, if there is a new leadership in Russia and they find themselves in a difficult position because they have to take over and it's going to be an angry, poorer — it's going to be a hobbled society in a sense.

Then there's a lot of Western leaders, I think, who will feel nervous and will say, “Look, we don't want the same case as with Germany, where after World War I, we pushed them too far and look, we got Hitler. We need to go soft on Russia now, otherwise World War III is around the corner.”

Anastasiia: I hate this historical example. It will definitely be used. I am not disagreeing with you, but I just hate when it's brought up in these discussions because within that same broad historical timeline you can come up with arguments against being soft in Russia.

But yeah, the key is, is like, okay, it will bankrupt them for decades. I'm not really sure what would be a fair alternative. Well, because again, if Russia doesn't pay and if Russia doesn't pay reparations, think about how that's going to go with the Ukrainian society.

Because we're all definitely just hoping for the victory day and hoping that Russia will pay as a broad statement, be it criminally via military generals being charged in the Hague or something. And also, Russia paying for their building of all of this. We're not going to be happy if Russia just walks away like nothing happened.

Jakub: No.

Anastasiia: So, these two interests, we're going to have to negotiate that because yes, the Russian society is going to be very angry if they have to pay. We are going to be very angry if they don't have to pay. So, it's going to be an imbalanced situation either/or. The question is, what is the morally the right thing to do?

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: So, there are also other ways to pay for this that we haven't mentioned, being foreign aid and private money. So, just large companies investing. Right?

Jakub: Absolutely. We shouldn't dis-consider or sort of ignore the value of private capital here. Of course, that depends on what the peace looks like and to what extent the security issues have been dealt with.

But the reconstruction of Ukraine, it's a huge project and there's a lot of companies that will be interested in going and investing in Ukrainian agriculture. There will be a lot of security and defence companies.

Ukraine is now the biggest testing ground unfortunately for what 21st century warfare looks like. So, there's a lot of know-how expertise and there's going to be a massive defence industry building around that.

But beyond that, creative industries, IT and so forth, there will be a lot of companies that come into Ukraine.

Anastasiia: This actually leads us to another issue that was raised by our follower with username Takennig. They said, “I just hope inhabitants will be able to reconstruct just as they want, and not like big foreign companies want. New buildings here (France), are not good quality. No soundproofing, no decoration at all. Don't let them screw up everything pretending to help.”

And I think this is actually a really fair concern because this kind of aid has been seen by many people around the world, in the developing world as kind of this soft form of neo-colonialism. We are the guys with the money, so we're going to figure out how that money is spent in your country anywhere. And we don't care what the local population wants or needs.

Jakub: Yeah. China has been doing this all over the Global South. Right?

Anastasiia: Exactly. And they've been trying to do this in Ukraine, and I remember the upheaval then went on within the anti-China activist community in Ukraine.

But yeah, it's a very typical kind of story where you invest a bunch of money, but there are strings attached and China is not the only party to this. Obviously, the IMF has done this around the world.

But one way that we can combat this is that it's not like Ukraine has a lack of professionals in all of these industries, especially when it comes to creative industries like architecture, project management, IT, design, whatever. We definitely do not have a brain drain situation. We don't have a lack of expertise in general.

Jakub: Ukraine has had waves of quite significant foreign investment since the 90s. By the way, that's actually why the Kyiv Post, the predecessor of the Kyiv Independent, was set up because after a lot of investment in the 90s, there were a lot of expats that came in and they spoke English, didn't speak Russian or Ukrainian.

And essentially, they needed some kind of news about what was happening in the country that they had-

Anastasiia: Invested into. Yeah.

Jakub: Yeah, exactly. But look at what has happened in Ukraine over close to 30 years. I would not say that Ukrainians have “gotten screwed out” of their own country by foreigners.

In fact, it's almost been the opposite to an embarrassing level, where a lot of investors ended up putting money into different companies and seeing their actual control and interests sort of disappear through various Byzantine legal and corrupt mechanisms.

So, I'm not so afraid, if that makes sense for the Ukrainians to kind of lose their own country here.

Although look, is there an uncomfortable level of dependence when you have the government that is dependent on the West for security, but also big Western firms that are often connected to the public sector, especially the defence firms and so forth, that are playing such a critical role in the reconstruction? Yes, that feels like a bit much.

Anastasiia: But at the end of the day, A, we don't have a choice and B, this is the least bad option that we've got. So, we just kind of have to go with it.

[Music Playing]

Jakub: Absolutely agree on the least bad option. Yeah.

Anastasiia: Another listener question was about whether the cost of rebuilding in Ukraine can be substituted by post-war tourism. So, Robert asked, “I hope there will be some kind of travels arranged where we could do both tourism things, but also help with something useful to help rebuilding up Ukraine again.”

And then Andrew Watson also asked, “Given the almost voyeuristic nature of the war, would it be unethical to visit places like Bakhmut or Soledar as a post-war tourist? What is the best way to pay our respect to those brave souls, but not be cringe?” This is an excellent question. Jakub, what are your instincts?

Jakub: Well, first just there was a point about — in terms of financially it's tiny. It's a drop in the ocean. It's good. It will help some local businesses, mid-size businesses just travel to Ukraine, but it's not meaningful in its scope.

But you want people to have a sense of the reality of it. You want them to know about it, to remember it. The truth is that when we travel somewhere and we see something, it's just such a more vivid memory and we take the time to actually learn about the place that we're going to. So, I would say yes.

At the same time, I have to say as somebody who is from Poland who spent a big part of their life growing up in Poland, I kind of hated the fact that the whole world would come and visit my country to bear witness to a genocide that a foreign power had exacted in my country.

Anastasiia: Why did you hate it?

Jakub: Well, because then that's sort of what your-

Anastasiia: Legacy becomes.

Jakub: Yeah. Look, it's just having your country associated with something so horrible, so negative, yeah, it becomes your identity.

Anastasiia: I completely understand what you're trying to say because it’s just how you introduce yourself as Ukrainian right now, everyone abroad just gets kind of confused and doesn't know what to say and doesn't know whether to be positive or whether that would be out of place. And yet they should be in like negative and feel pity for you.

But at the same time, I know that I, for example, has studied the Middle East a lot in university. And before the war actually, my whole career plan and my entire life plan was to work in counterterrorism in the Middle East. And I was going to get my master's and study Arabic and go work somewhere in Lebanon or Syria or Iraq.

And obviously, the reason why these places were interesting to me, not the entire reason, I am also extremely interested in cultural aspects and the social aspect of it. But I was interested in these places because it was torn by conflict.

And it was interesting for me how societies merge out of that and how they persevere and how they continue having something of a normal life amid all of the conflict that happened.

Would that be inappropriate then? Because I'm interested in a place because it has had this tragic history and I want to go there, and I want to see these places and I want to see museums and libraries that were destroyed by ISIS.

I want to see how they were rebuilt because I have the curiosity and I also have immense respect for the local population that has a life amidst all of that.

So, I think it's just about being respectful and when going to these places being kind of a fly on the wall in a way, right?

Jakub: Yeah.

Anastasiia: You can do your thing and be curious and see things. And I totally understand this curiosity, but you have to listen to the locals, understand the local context, don't expect too much in terms of hospitality and these stages. You have to really understand that you're going not for a vacation, but you're going into a war zone.

Jakub: Yeah. And at the end of the day, we spend so much time thinking about how to not offend people.

Anastasiia: Right.

Jakub: If you're curious and you want to do something, just go ahead and do it. And if Ukraine is open to people coming and seeing all of the memorials — and by the way, I was talking about the tragic history of Poland. Just in Kyiv you have the Holodomor Memorial, you have the Babyn Yar Memorial. Ukraine has so many tragedies and yet the people have this resilience-

Anastasiia: Exactly.

Jakub: And creativity and they look towards the future and somehow, it's not quite as oppressive.

[Music Playing]

I feel Poles are very pessimistic and stuck in the past. Yeah okay, let's not make this a Poland episode. If Ukraine is fine for you to visit, go ahead. It's a beautiful country and it will be.

Thank you so much for listening to Power Lines. Next week we'll be speaking more about the rebuilding of Ukraine, and specifically how Ukrainian society can heal from the traumas of the war.

Anastasiia: Power Lines is a partnership between the Kyiv Independent and Message Heard. It was produced by Bea Duncan, Harry Stott, and Talia Augustidis. The executive producer is Sandra Ferrari. The theme music is by Tom Biddle and Alfie Godfrey.

Season 1 Episode 11

Power Lines Season 1 Episode 11 Transcript

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: I am looking at two photos of Irpin, my hometown, a small place of about 60,000 people, 20 kilometres north of Kyiv. You may remember it as one of the last strongholds of Ukrainian resistance when Russia made its assault on Kyiv nearly a year ago now. It was partly occupied in the early stages of the war.

The first photo is from 2015. It's a bird's eye shot of a normal looking town, green trees surrounding modest houses with a busy commuter bridge running over a meandering river. It looks European, definitely.

The second photo is from 2022, but it looks like it's from a different century. There is a massive rubble, gap-tooth holes where people's houses once were, cars are blacked out and mangled. And the bridge is a splintered, fractured wreck. It's not somewhere I recognize.

Jakub: The damage that Russia has inflicted on Ukraine's infrastructure has been devastating. It's probably the most visceral sign of the war. People have been left without homes. Monuments and buildings are surrounded by sandbags or else damaged and destroyed.

But in those sandbags, you can see in others, hope, because even while the war continues across the country, individuals are safeguarding their homes with what they can and beginning the huge task of rebuilding Ukraine.

To start this week's episode, we wanted to hear from two of them.

Anastasiia: [Speaking Foreign Language].

Borys: [Speaking Foreign Language].

Anastasiia: Borys Dorogov is the COO of Balbek Bureau, an interior architecture studio he co-founded in Kyiv with his partner Slava Balbek. Mention Balbek to any young Ukrainian, and they will recognize the name. These guys built some of my favourite spaces in the country.

In March 2022, Balbek's team decided to help their building effort with a social initiative they call RE: Ukraine. They have loads of different projects across the country, one of which involves building temporary shelters for IDPs or internally displaced people.

Borys: There are already several, temporary live-in quarters were built in Ukraine since 2014. They were mostly built from the shipment containers, which are limited in order to easily transport them.

So, we decided that we need to improve somehow, the person's state of mind, also to keep their dignity, even if they're inside circumstances like we have right now. Doing that project as a completely new approach to temporary living because first of all, comes comfort, not the materials which can be transported by the roads.

The project started develop very quickly, and now we started to build the pilot project near Kyiv in Bucha, which will give lodging for 15 families.

Anastasiia: Your guys’ catchphrase with this project is dignity no matter what. And I'm glad you mentioned it, that kind of socialisation and comfort is a key part of what you guys are trying to do. How exactly does that look like in practice?

Borys: First of all, we keep the person's space in a comfortable way. It is wide enough to put the bed. It is wide enough to put a normal window, normal doors.

Anastasiia: So, you're not trying to crunch a hundred people in a small space. You're just trying to build it normally from the beginning?

Borys: Yeah. The second thing, we build lots of community spaces and lots of sharing spaces. And those sharing spaces are not shared bathrooms. These are common spaces like a big kitchen with big tables, which is also transformable to different functions, which will help people to integrate into different societies.

[Music Playing]

Jakub: Before any of Borys’ new designs can be implemented, the decaying structures have to be dealt with. The remnants of war need to be wiped clean. Balbek are not the only people involved in the rebuilding effort.

Other teams of volunteers are coming together to start the process themselves, like Andrii Kopylenko, the co-founder of the charity organisation, District One.

To start off, I'd like to ask you before the full-scale invasion, what was District One doing?

Andrii: District One was organised in 2018, but until 2020, we created events in Ukraine for rebuilding some streets, and only after full escalation of the war, we decided to start again our project. But in other way.

Jakub: Before the war, District One were reviving Kyiv's urban ecosystem, but their urban regeneration pivoted after the full-scale invasion to something much more pragmatic.

Can you tell us a little bit about the current projects that you're doing?

Andrii: In the first two weeks and maybe one, two months we trying to clean streets, clean some buildings, trying to cover up for rain, for snow, or something like that.

In the start of the summer, we understood that we need to collect more money for rebuilding because if people don't have a roof, it's not so good when we are just cleaning up, we need to rebuild their buildings.

And now we are building 26 buildings in Chernihiv region. We already built three buildings in Kyiv region, private houses for families. Also rebuilding big apartment house for 70 apartments, rebuilding 55 houses, which not totally destroyed. We just rebuilding.

Jakub: Can you tell me a little bit about what that first project looked like? How did you organise it?

Andrii: First day was really interesting because when we understood that we can go to Kyiv region, we organised all meetings with local governments and understood they can give us a chance to go and help them because not everybody can go in occupied territories in first days.

Jakub: And just for context, the reason why you couldn't go there before is that there were a lot of Russian troops around there. So, we're talking about the moment after they had been expelled, and it was possible for civilians to access those regions.

Andrii: A lot of mines, a lot of bombs. And first hour weeks we worked exactly with military, with soldiers. They show us, it was like a square where you can go. And they said that in this part of Hostomel, you can work with volunteers, with civilian people because it's clear with no bombs, no dangerous objects in this part. And we cleaned that up.

But in some weeks, we understood by ourselves how to organise this work, how to work with the local government, with military, how to deliver these volunteers in this region.

It's one of the most important part of our job because it's like psychologists help for them. Because there was in occupation territory for 30 days, for example. And it's really difficult to be in this situation.

And after that, when they saw us, they understand that “Oh, my God, we are not alone. We can live our life after this crazy situation.”

[Music Playing]

Jakub: Rebuilding homes and fixing infrastructure is the first step in rebuilding Ukraine from the ground up. But as well as reconstruction, things need to be preserved.

Another social initiative from Balbek seeks to protect Ukraine's monuments from harm. You've probably seen the photos of statues in Kiev surrounded by sandbags, cultural artifacts of huge significance to Ukraine's national identity, all covered in scaffolding and wrapped in plastic.

Anastasiia: So, to continue the legacy of the monuments underneath, the coverings also include images of the monument itself and a QR code leading to their Wikipedia page. It's protecting them, all while keeping their symbolic resonance alive for all to see.

And then you're not only shielding monuments, you're also making a memorial in Irpin. Tell us about that, that place and why it's important.

Borys: There is a bridge in Irpin, which was destroyed during the war. It was destroyed by explosion, and some cars fallen down to the river. Some parts of bridge also fell down to the riverbed.

It reminded the broken bone to Slava, and it was his initiative to make from it a monument. The idea was to make some landscaping, which will allow people to look at it from different points, but to keep that architecture, that wound of Ukrainian earth open to you. And that's the main idea.

Anastasiia: Those photos I mentioned of my hometown, well, Balbek are making the splintered bridge into a monument. The bridge which connects my home with Kyiv, was destroyed on February 25th, 2022, by Ukrainian forces to prevent Russia from entering the capitol.

Balbek's monument will leave the fracture as it is, with the platform to view it, immortalising its memory as an object of resistance against war and Russian aggression.

These small-scale rebuilding efforts, whether of people's homes, monuments, or memorials, are about returning the Ukrainian people's dignity. They're indelibly linked to the reconstruction of a national identity. Here is Andrii again.

Andrii: I see that our project now created really huge community. We know that maybe 50 organisations in Ukraine, they're trying to make something like we are doing. And for us, it's really good. We love that people seeing what we are doing and trying to do it by themselves because government can’t do everything.

Now for government the most important thing is the war. We understand that only civilian people can help themself in civilian life.

[Music Playing]

Jakub: What about the reactions of the people who have moved back into some of the rebuilt areas? Is there any sort of typical messages that you hear, things that they're saying?

Andrii: They’re always crying. For them it's a hope for new life. They didn't expect that they can go back to their home in two months. And when we are giving them this chance, it is most important thing.

It's like energy of our organisation, of our people who are working with us, all of them saying that only one thing which helps us work in every day without vacation, without holidays. You are understanding that your life, it's not only yours when you are working with charity organisation, you need to help other people.

Jakub: The work of rebuilding Ukraine is already happening at a granular level, but amid the talks of a Marshall Plan for rebuilding Ukraine's economy or a Green new Deal from the West, putting things back together in the here and now needs to come from Ukrainians themselves.

It needs to be owned by Ukraine and be seen to owned by Ukraine. Even in the midst of war, the first steps towards this have already begun.

Anastasiia: From Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent, you're listening to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World.

Jakub: In this series, we're going to be mapping the undercurrents and global consequences of the war in Ukraine, beginning in Kyiv, and following the roads out wherever they may lead. I'm Jakub Parusinski.

Anastasiia: And I'm Anastasiia Lapatina. This week we're beginning a two-parter to end our first series, looking at how Ukraine is being rebuilt both now and following the war.

And today we're focusing on infrastructure and the economy to things which have been really devastated by the Russian full-scale invasion.

Jakub: Yes. So, one thing which has been really interesting economically, on the one hand it's been really interesting and inspiring to see how durable and resistant the Ukrainian economy has been.

So, if you think about the situation back to February of last year, Russia launched this all-out war against Ukraine. Not just the tanks rolling in across Ukraine's borders, the troops landing and all of that, but also cyber warfare against its infrastructure, its banking system. There's been a tax on its economy, shipments that couldn't go out through different Ukrainian ports. And it's almost surprising how resistant the Ukrainian economy has been.

So, the hryvnia has held up, it's devalued a little bit, but it has held since. The Central Bank reserves are holding up, the country's continuing to function.

Anastasiia: So, what you were saying is that could have been significantly worse.

Jakub: Absolutely. So, Ukraine's GDP dropped by about a third, and when you look at the forecasts from the first days of the full-scale invasion, they were actually much more grim.

Anastasiia: Interesting.

Jakub: They expected to be a complete collapse, and Ukraine has held, and it has held in a very impressive way.

Anastasiia: And is that because of all of the foreign and aid that we're getting? Because I know the monthly payments that we get is like, that is the money that we essentially used to pay all the salaries. That's how we keep the government functioning. It looks like we would literally collapse without it.

Jakub: Absolutely. There's 5 billion a month that is sort of coming in to keep Ukraine afloat. But even that in itself isn't enough to keep the economy going.

That replenishes the Central Bank Reserve. It covers for the drop in tax revenues because obviously, a lot of businesses have been shut. A lot of people have moved out, their real earnings have dropped.

But even with that money, it's not an easy task. And Ukraine has performed admirably. But the challenge ahead is kind of insane if you think about it.

Anastasiia: I just don't even really know how to talk about it because it's just so big. And I'm actually a bit worried about this rethinking process because this is going to also need to happen in a large scale. All of these buildings that have been destroyed, many of them are terrible looking and just completely non-functional.

And the way we rebuild them is going to have to be by modern standards. And I'm really interesting in what that's going to look like.

To dig into all of this a bit deeper. This week we both did interviews with two really top economists from both Ukrainian and international perspectives.

Let's start with you, Jakub. Who did you speak to?

Jakub: Yeah, so I spoke with Ivan Miklos, a Slovakian politician and former Minister of Finance. So, Ivan has been a driver of this sort of program of liberalisation and transformation for Slovakia, which worked extremely well and sort of turned it in what was then called the Tatra Tiger, this kind of booming economy.

Since leaving politics in Slovakia, he spent about five years advising the Ukrainian government, actually working with the Ministry of Finance and other positions.

And today he's working with Ukraine's National Recovery Council as they plot a route forward towards the post-war reconstruction of Ukraine.

So, he was actually pretty perfectly placed to answer my questions about what needs to happen in order for Ukraine to have a successful recovery.

You are now working with the National Recovery Council. I know that you have looked a lot at reform in Ukraine and what this means in terms of the future EU integration. What does your current work at the National Recovery Council look like?

Ivan: Yeah, generally speaking about what is the today's situation regarding reforms and integration because these are very important, that successful post-communist countries have been successful not only because reforms, but also because integration, EU integration and these processes are interconnected of course.

And now it is first good news — of course, war is terrible. Bad news is tragic, but maybe paradoxically, some things are, especially will of the Ukrainians, Ukrainian nation to be unified, to really have strong will, to be part of the Western society and to support necessary changes, necessary forms now is stronger than it was before.

And integration, the candidate status is very, very important. Which means on one side it is more difficult situation because the cost of the war and direct/undirect damage is impossible to even count some material damage.

But on the other side, I hope, and I think that this unity, this will and this courage not only to win in a fight, in a war, but also to change the country and to rebuild country, not the same as it was before war, but is really new, the country is very, very, very strong.

Without financial support, it couldn't be possible to hold macroeconomic stability in such, surprisingly strong level as it is during last year, for instance, during war year.

It is of course difficult to say that war could have some positive side, but there are some aspects which is very, very important to use in speeding up necessarily for necessary changes.

Jakub: Looking forward a bit, let's say hypothetically the war ends in a couple of months, how do we rebuild Ukraine? What were the things that are really sort of critical, the key elements for you to essentially rebuild the country?

Ivan: Yeah, there are a lot of things, but one thing is even important precondition before speaking about economic dimension, to speak about how war … and it’s the key, because only a real end of the war, which will not create more problems than solutions, is that Ukraine have to return to its international recognized borders, including Crimea and Donbas and Luhansk.

Because if not, I'm afraid that any kind of bad compromise, it'll be the source of so big instability, and tensions inside Ukraine that outside Ukraine as well, but especially inside Ukraine, that it couldn't be possible in this conditions to really successfully rebuild and reconstruct the country.

This is my deep conviction after spending five years in Ukraine, and after I think knowing and feeling the atmosphere and the society.

Jakub: Could you say a bit more about the reasons for this instability? What would be the problems? So, for example, right now, part of the integration process is essentially adopting EU legislation. Part of it is about rebuilding roads. What would be the sources of this instability?

Ivan: The main source of instability will be that today by public opinion polls majority, almost 90% of Ukrainians are strongly supporting, are strongly convinced that Ukraine has to return to its internationally recognized borders.

And any bad compromise could create so big dissatisfaction and frustration among people, especially among those who lost their friends, their family members. It could create a lot of tensions and problems.

Which means politically that compromise and sacrificing some part of territory, for instance, will create a lot of tensions inside of the society because people simply don't want to accept that changing borders, their own countries borders by force is acceptable and can be acceptable even.

Can you imagine how many veterans and people affected somehow by war will be after this war? How many veterans will be among people? How huge could be this dissatisfaction? And how strong could be this emotion if they will feel that their losses and everything was for nothing? Or at least they'll see that it was politicians finally accepted some defeat and some bad compromise.

I'm deeply convinced that this emotion is and it'll be very, very strong. And that's the reason why necessary precondition for stability, not only in Ukraine, but even much broader, even internationally, even in the global scale, why it's important that Putin will be defeated, and Ukraine will win and will be able to return to its internationally recognized border.

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Anastasiia: I think this point that Ivan brought up is really, really crucial, especially with the scale of involvement that Ukrainians have with active facilities now, and by that I mean that our veterans are not a few dozen thousand people. I think the amount of people in our society that have either actively participated in war or have family members who've done so is a huge, huge number.

So, if that group has some sort of overwhelming feeling of discontent after whatever peace plan we agree on comes through, that's really going to be a problem. And it is not only a problem morally because of course we want to respect the effort and the sacrifice that these amazing people have done.

But also, I think politically it will be, because it's probably pretty obvious (correct me if I'm wrong), that some of those veterans perhaps are going to aim for certain level of political power.

I think we've seen this in 2014, that people who were actively involved in the revolution, for example, or in Donbas, they then went on to pursue political interest, which is fair.

So, if that happens and there is conflict, I think that's going to be really problematic and it's just going to cause more instability and that's not something that we need at all.

Jakub: You're absolutely right. I think the way that Ukraine ends up integrating, reintegrating, working with its veterans is going to be absolutely critical for the future of the country.

What I mean is, you look at societies that are heavily militarised, Israel, the U.S., having a pathway and sort of having bridges between the army and the private sector and the political sort of various initiatives, the civic sector, this is essentially something that will make or break the future of Ukraine. Right?

Anastasiia: Yeah, I agree.

Jakub: So, how the country deals with that, it's really important.

Anastasiia: This also just really highlights why we can probably say for sure that if we do concede any territory, it will be some sort of en masse upheaval.

Jakub: Massive resentment is a very dangerous thing for Ukraine. But I argue that even sort of thinking from the perspective of conceding territory, it's sort of starting from the wrong place because whatever happens, the truth is that the current people in power in Russia (and I'm not talking about just Putin, this is going several levels down the line, at the very least), see Ukraine as an enemy state that they need to destroy.

So, even if Ukraine reconquers all of its territory tomorrow, they're still planning to reinvade. Nothing changes for that.

Anastasiia: Yeah. That's true. Yes. That’s absolutely true.

Jakub: And whether it's five years’ time, 10 years’ time. So, I'd almost argue that if you concede territory now, well you are just sort of easing them all into the next war.

Anastasiia: Yeah.

Jakub: But even if you don't concede any territory, essentially what you want to portray is that you are kind of — it's a little bit like in business negotiations where you essentially tell the other party “I'm crazy, this is my red line. And if you do even a small thing to sort of go beyond my red line, I will react disproportionately.”

They need to say, “Look, any sort of additional kind of attempt to coerce Ukraine is going to be met with disproportional reactions because you want to stave off the next war, which will come.”

Now Nastya, you also spoke to another guest this week, right?

Anastasiia: I did, because as well as that international perspective, we also wanted to hear from someone in Ukraine. So, I was really lucky to sit down with Tymofiy Mylovanov. Tymofiy is another economist who works across some of the highest positions in the Ukrainian civil society and government.

He's the president of the Kyiv School of Economics, currently an advisor to Zelenskyy Administration, and previously the Minister of Economy in Ukraine from 2019 to 2020.

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Now, Ivan mentioned that assessing the material damage of buildings and infrastructure in Ukraine is a really difficult task, impossible even. So, I asked Tymofiy about this and how the government in Ukraine are beginning to calculate the material cost of this war.

Tymofiy, thank you so much for finding the time. I know you're very busy these days.

So, we're particularly interested in the damage assessment and the destruction of infrastructure in Ukraine. So, let's talk about the scale of this damage. Can we put a number on it and if we can, what does that number actually mean, practically speaking?

Tymofiy: There are multiple methodologies and there are multiple numbers which are out there in the field. So, we have the most recent report, which actually came out on the 24th of January. And it says that the total amount of damages has increased to $138 billion.

This number is measured as direct losses to the economy, according to the methodology, which is based and an upgraded version of the methodology used by The World Bank.

The amount of damage and the extent of war is so large in Ukraine, so that sometimes the standard methodology doesn't work. For example, if you took the Mariupol damage, we don't even have access to that.

Anastasiia: Right, yeah.

Tymofiy: And even if we had, it probably is not practical, feasible, it would take 10 years or five years to document everything.

So, the way we then do damage assessment, we use satellite imaging and drone imaging and AI recognition. The number is direct damage, direct damage is the cost to rebuild or devalued.

But as of the January 24th, it's 138 billion. To put this number in perspective, the nominal value of GDP in 2021 of Ukraine was $200 billion. So, it is about 70% of annual GDP has been destroyed. So, it's a large number comparatively, but even in absolute terms for any economy, it would be a large number.

And the leading element of this, it's housing, it's $54 billion, in fact, between five and 7% of residential housing has been destroyed. So, think of this as every, I don't know, 12th, 15th house, a building in your country or in your village or in your city has been destroyed or damaged by Russian artillery or missiles.

Then the next it's infrastructure. This is roads, bridges it's about $35 billion. Assets of enterprises industry, manufacturing, for example, meteorological plants, just one example, some production facilities are at 13 billion, educational facility at nine, energy facilities at seven, agriculture and land resources at six. And you keep going.

There's transport, trade, utilities, cultures, sport, tourism, healthcare, and we are not even counting ecology because if you start counting, this might even be in trillions, but there's also a direct assessment of ecology. And it's at $14 billion currently, which in my view is an extreme understatement. It’s a underestimation.

Anastasiia: Underestimation, yeah. So, when you say that it's direct damage, does that mean that we now need that exact number that we lost to rebuild it back? Or do we need a bigger number?

Tymofiy: We tend to need more. Because actually it costs much more because first you have to clean up and remove the foundation, remove what's left of the building.

On top of that, often, we want to build back better. So, if we have a house which has been destroyed, but this house was built let's say in 30s or 50s of the previous century, then often we will be building … that house might not have been even up to the standards today, up to the current regulations.

But there could be also savings in the sense that we might try to build back better, and we don't have to build inefficient facilities, but it tends to be 40, 50 and sometimes 100 percent more what needs to be, if we're actually thinking about rebuilding in terms of cost.

On top of that, there is a different number, which is opportunity cost of damages, which is not only counting the direct damages, but also what has been lost. Because if we take a clinic for example, and there is a direct cost of rebuilding a clinic, but there's also a period of time the clinic has not been operational and will not be operational. And that means people have been denied care.

If you're talking about facility and business, manufacturing or infrastructure or a road, then business has not been done. People have not earned money; products have not been delivered, taxes have not been paid.

So, you can calculate the opportunity cost. And when these numbers come up, then we hear numbers like $355 billion from the World Bank of 750 from the government of Ukraine. And I think the number is probably between 500 billion and a trillion, if we take into account everything which has been lost so far.

Anastasiia: So, what is the Ukrainian government's current plan to deal with this number? Where are we going to get this money?

Tymofiy: This is a trillion-dollar question.

Anastasiia: Literally.

Tymofiy: Where are we going to get it? Yeah, a trillion-dollar. In practice, it's very difficult to get this amount of funding very quickly during the war or post-war, unless there is a coordinated effort at the political level and there is a source of funding.

And the source of funding, the most realistic in my view, would be the Russian assets, which have been frozen outside of Russian jurisdiction and which should be confiscated.

And in my view, it's the fair and the right thing to do because Russia has imposed this damage. So, Russia has to pay. It's the only just thing.

Anastasiia: It's logical.

Tymofiy: So, and the source of money is there because there are several hundred billion dollars. The estimates differ from 300 plus to $500 plus billion, but they're there and they can be confiscated, and they can be used. In the long run on this is a much better deal.

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Jakub: It's a little bit mind boggling to think about the scale of the damage in Ukraine.

Anastasiia: Yeah. I don't even know how to react to it to be honest. I think the numbers are kind of beyond comprehension.

Jakub: The idea of sort of a trillion invested to rebuild a East European economy is something that was absolutely unfathomable a couple of years ago.

Anastasiia: I think one way to kind of digest this a bit easier is to perhaps not think about it as trillion dollars right here and now, and something that Ukraine is going to have to receive it within a month. Of course not. This is going to be many, many chunks spread across dozens and hundreds of donors, countries, organisations, et cetera, across years.

Jakub: The other side of it, and sort of this is the, I guess maybe optimistic perspective, is Ukraine plays this really central role in a lot of, let's say, industries or pieces of the broader European economic puzzle.

It is one of the paths sort of to get into Europe historically. That's sort of one of the reasons that, for example, there were some plans on Chinese infrastructure investment and building roads and whatnot.

With the roads — oh God, actually this is kind of devastating now that I think about it. Because look, Ukraine was interesting from the perspective of it is a breadbasket that is very close to Europe, but also to the Middle East, which is sort of this deficit area. And you need to export lots of food stuffs to that region.

It's a country that's the size of Texas on Europe's border, which creates a lot of opportunities. What I think is a little bit scary is that historically it was also seen as a land bridge between sort of Europe and Asia.

And there was this perspective of running railways between sort of China and Europe that would probably cross through Ukraine. There were a lot of kind of these speculative plans.

Now if there's a hard border with Russia and all the ties are cut and there's a big trench on the border, none of that is happening. And that's actually kind of scary from Ukraine's perspective because then it really becomes the periphery.

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: Next I wanted to find out some more from Tymofiy about the money Ukraine is likely to get from the international community and about the conditions under which this money will be given.

In one of your articles, you mentioned the problem of conditionality when it comes to money that we receive from the EU or from the U.S. or from our other partners, that there are always strings attached and conditions that Ukraine has to fulfil.

And you said that while that's of course natural, that people want to check on where the money is going and how it's spent and everything, it is important, but it can also be vulnerable to what Russia may do with that.

Tymofiy: There are three aspects to it. One is conditionality is good or it can be bad. It depends on the competence of people who are designing this conditionality. And so, it's important that there is very high-quality personnel who is designing this conditions or thinking about this contracts not based on some stereotypes or some knowledge of some concepts of let's say how it worked in Afghanistan or in Iraq.

Anastasiia: People like to compare.

Tymofiy: People do. And I think it's a good comparison to demonstrate the difference. Actually, there has been over time a lot of understanding that Ukraine should not be treated as a country, which doesn't have the government, doesn't have the agency.

And President Zelenskyy has demonstrated and has built the brand of sovereignty. And I think at this point people understand that there should be ownership of the reconstruction and it should be run by Ukrainians. And I think that's item number two.

So, whatever the conditions are in place, you have to ensure that it is Ukrainians who are designing their future, not some outsiders, because Ukraine is not a colony.

And then there's the third point, of course about corruption, but more generally about competition, about competence, about lobbying, about profiteering. And that happens in all areas.

And again, I will use the example of Afghanistan and the reports coming out after decades of support for Afghanistan, of how much funding was diverted by also international agencies and officers and corporations.

And so, we've already seen some of it in Ukraine where different companies local, domestic and also international are starting to position themselves to try to benefit and profit from the reconstruction, where different companies will be coming in and say, “Listen, our country have helped you quite a bit during the war, now through the embassy or through some political connections, please give us the contracts.”

So, all of that has to be addressed. And I think Ukraine will manage it because Ukraine essentially is fighting two wars.

Anastasiia: That's true.

Jakub: One war is on the front lines, and the other one is the very same Russian culture. So, Russia has a culture problem on top of all other problems and corruption in Ukraine is actually the same Russian culture. Which-

Anastasiia: It's a plague.

Tymofiy: Yes. It has no empathy for the cause of others. It disregards the rules, it ignores and tries to takes advantage. It lies, it exploits, and it's done in a broad light. And there's no limit to it, that's why I want to be a part of Europe because we don't want to be a part of this.

But it's everywhere. Russian culture is bad, and we have elements of that, and so we have to eradicate it. So, we're fighting that war too. And I'm confident Ukraine will win both battles, but that's a long road to have.

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Jakub: What do you make of these conditions that Tymofiy just mentioned?

Anastasiia: I think the fact that many conditions exist to these huge sums is completely fair. If I was sending that much money to rebuild something, I'd be interested in how that's spent.

But it depends on what kind of conditions. If those are conditions that are all about transparency and accountability, then I'm all for it. Because we know that Ukraine perhaps needs a few nudges in the right direction when it comes to transparency. And I definitely want those strings attached.

But if it's something like what the IMF usually does where they're like, “We're going to give you a bunch of money, but you change half of the way that your economy functions, to adjust to our systems,” then no, of course not. I think that's a bit absurd.

And I think that Tymofiy is correct in saying that Ukraine is an independent country, and that's actually the key points of this war, and it will be when we win. And Ukraine is not a colony, and we don't want to be a colony. This should not in any way be an exercise of, “We're going to give you billions of dollars, but now you are going to rely on us and do what we tell you to do.”

Jakub: I think that's fair. Ukraine has earned the right to be assertive and to show that it can be a responsible caretaker and steward of all of this capital. Take a look at sort of how overall the military aid has been used, how the social aid, there was a lot of concerns about corruption that's going all over the place or being ineffective, and I think Ukraine has stepped up.

Should there be checks? Should there be monitoring? Yeah, absolutely.

Anastasiia: Of course.

Jakub: The fact that things are going relatively well now doesn't mean that they always will be. So, and that doesn't give you a full licence to do whatever you want. But the comparison with Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine is different. There is a functioning government, there is a-

Anastasiia: We're not a collapsed state in any way.

Jakub: No, not at all. And I think really, this has been not just the government, but the people of Ukraine, the way that they've rallied, they've organised in very difficult circumstances shows that this a very different situation.

Anastasiia: And also, we are not making these arguments up. I think just a week ago or something, a new report came out from the U.S. that they were checking the due diligence and all of the military aid that they sent to us, and they found no mismanagement and no problems with the way that U.S. military aid and the money was applied in Ukraine, so-

Jakub: No, you're absolutely right. Have there been sort of cases here and there of various misdeeds? Yes, sure.

Anastasiia: For sure.

Jakub: By the way, it's quite encouraging to see that the government is also sort of following up on some of them and kicking people out, and there's turnover in the cabinet and so forth. These are all encouraging signs, right?

Anastasiia: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jakub: In a sense, you think about it, every single country has criminals. The question is, is the country putting them into prisons or putting them in power?

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: Shall we hear some more from Ivan to end, Jakub?

Jakub: Yes. He actually had a lot to say about the kind of opportunities that potentially lie ahead for Ukraine in this rebuilding process, given the kind of money that might be available for investment.

So, in terms of where that money needs to be spent, I had the chance to look for the recovery plan. In terms of the big buckets, it looks like there is a lot of work around energy. There is a lot of work around logistics, obviously, Ukraine now has enemy borders on three sides that are kind of blocking its way. And there is a huge bucket in terms of housing. Are those sort of the big ones, first of all?

And then secondly, what are the things that private investors or maybe indeed government investors, public investors, what are the big things that they would be looking at in those areas?

Ivan: Yeah. But before speaking about areas, let me say that what I think is even more important. It is first, yes, you're right that still even after war, the systemic risk to invest in Ukraine will be much higher than in, let's say Central and Western European countries.

But there are no known mechanisms how, for instance, is the possible to use, for instance, part of the Russian frozen money as money for covering political and war risk by insurance. This will be very important part of this institutional framework for reducing risk connected with investing in Ukraine.

Second important point is that of course, investment in the Ukraine will be even after war, connected with a higher risk, but also with higher possibilities and higher opportunities.

Because even before war, Ukraine was deep, very deeply under its potential, Ukraine had a really huge potential. Ukraine had everything, the educated people, the best land in the world, natural resources, everything. But this potential was unused.

Now, Ukrainian economy dropped by 30% in one year, which means potential for high and sustainable economy growth for Ukraine after war is unbelievable. Ukraine could have over 10% economy growth for many years, for 10 years maybe. It'll create so many opportunities for return of the investment, for profitable investment.

And then we can speak about areas and of course, the biggest area for the special public investment, public private investment is another, let's say instrument, it could be public private partnership, especially in infrastructure.

It was underdeveloped before war. It is now damaged by the war, which means it'll be need a lot of investment in infrastructure.

Housing, you have mentioned, public houses, private houses, kindergartens schools, hospitals, everything, in every area will be a lot of potential for new investment.

Jakub: What lessons, I guess, can we take in terms of preparing the reconstruction and well, two questions. So, one is in light of the unsuccessful Marshall Plans, the Iraq or the Afghanistan, these sort of coordination of responses.

And two, I guess, and this is unrelated, but it relates to the veterans that you mentioned earlier. Is there some way to engage them? Is there some kind of focus or some way to kind of … how do you deal with, because Ukraine will have a massive population of people who have been through war, have suffered through war, the veterans who have been fighting and they need to have a place in the new rebuilt Ukraine.

Ivan: Yeah. Let me start with veterans. It'll be one of the most important and very sensitive task and question how to deal with this, how to offer them also some kind of, I'm not saying compensation, but some kind of benefits for this. And there are a lot of experience from other countries in this regard.

But it is important to think in advance, even now, how to deal with this. And yes, on the one side it'll be sensitive, it'll be also potentially dangerous.

But on the other side, Ukraine will have surely the most experienced and most best trained army in Europe. Which means on the other side, it'll be not only kind of burden, but also let's say strong side of this.

Regarding your first question, I think fortunately Ukraine is not Afghanistan and Iraq. Culturally, Ukraine is European country, which means the risk is lower as it was in Afghanistan or Iraq, that it'll fail this reconstruction.

Especially important is that this strong unity and will of Ukrainians to become the part of Western society is the most important precondition for successful recovery, reconstruction, rebuilding, rebuilding process.

But it is inevitable but not sufficient precondition for success and very important will be what I have already mentioned, how to create this architecture, this institutional architecture of the using this money with strong ownership of Ukrainians and Ukrainian representatives. But at the same time also a maximum assistance and supervision of the Western donors.

And with using also, outsourcing public private partnership and this kind of mechanisms because reality and the most important, maybe the most dangerous also battle neck could be the limited capacity of the Ukrainian public sector to manage it effectively and transparent.

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: I have a thought. I have a thought.

Jakub: Sure. I have a slightly depressing thought as well.

Anastasiia: Go ahead. Okay. You start with the depressing one and I'll end with an optimistic one.

Jakub: Okay. So, there's a lot of opportunities to help Ukraine rebound after the war. One thing that concerns me a bit is, well, what kind of result will that actually lead to? Because Ukraine is now the poorest country in Europe, massively underinvested underdeveloped in recent years, even if it has a lot of potential.

And let's say that we get the next 10 years of 10% growth, that will multiply the economy by let's say two and a half, we're still halfway to Poland in the best of cases, probably a third of the way.

Anastasiia: That is a bit depressing, yes. But then on the other hand, I think there is a very real motivation for the West and especially for Europe, to do absolutely everything they can to help because this is also their project. Because well, first of all, if Ukraine is doing terribly economically, that is going to be felt across Europe and it's already being felt.

And likewise, like a big economic stimulus and Ukraine being prosperous and Ukraine having a working economy that can produce stuff and export stuff and buy stuff, that is also going to be felt across Europe. And that's going to be a very good thing for consumers and producers there.

But then also Ukraine is this global European project in a way, as in if Ukraine goes to war for progressive Western values and ideas, wins and then ends up being a country that does not have a stable economy, a country where the infrastructure hasn't been rebuilt in like 50 years and just not a place where you want to be, what is that going to say about the EU and what is that going to say about kind of this European dream, if you will?

Jakub: That's true. And there is an argument to try to use that in Ukraine's favour, to say that basically this is a litmus test of can Europe, a sleeping giant on the global stage, wake up and sort of take this country-

Anastasiia: Exactly.

Jakub: Which has fought and bled for it and turn it into a success case. And I think, you have the Ukrainian nation on board ready to do anything that's necessary to make that happen.

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: In two weeks in Power Lines, it'll be the one-year anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and our final episode of our first season, so to mark it, we're going to look to the future to explore how the nation will rebuild its national psyche when the war ends.

Jakub: If you want to further support us, you can subscribe to our ad free feed on Apple and by looking up Power Lines + on Spotify. You can also support the Kyiv Independent by finding us on our Patreon, to get behind the scenes content. Go to patreon.com/kyivindependent to continue helping us report on the most important stories in Ukraine.

Anastasiia: Look up Message Heard wherever you're listening to this podcast, for more of our original shows and find us on our website at messageheard.com or on our Power Lines Twitter @PowerLinesPod, as well as Instagram and Facebook by looking up at Message Heard.

Jakub: You can also follow the Kyiv Independent on Twitter and Facebook at Kyiv Independent and Instagram at kyivindependent_official to get the latest news and stay up to date with our coverage. Please also subscribe and rate Power Lines in your podcast app, as it really helps others find our show.

Anastasiia: Power Lines is a partnership between the Kyiv Independent and Message Heard. It was produced by Bea Duncan, Harry Stott, and Talia Augustidis. The executive producer is Sandra Ferrari. The theme music is by Tom Biddle and Alfie Godfrey.

Bonus Episode 10

Power Lines Season 1 Episode 10 Bonus Transcript

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: Hello listeners, welcome to our bonus episode of Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World. I'm Anastasiia Lapatina.

Jakub: And I'm Jakub Parusinski. Over the past few weeks, you've probably seen a few stories about the corruption in the Ukrainian government, something we haven't heard so much about since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.

To shed some light on it, this week we're speaking to Anna Myroniuk, the Head of investigations here at the Kyiv Independent, to examine these recent stories and explore the role that journalists play in reporting on them.

Hi Anna. Great to have you on.

Anna: Hello everyone. It's great to be here.

Jakub: Before we start talking about the specific cases, I just wanted to get your broad feeling. Ukraine is known as a country that has a corruption problem. It's been the case for decades. How do you see the current situation compared to the previous years?

Anna: Honestly Jakub, I don't think that there is a huge change in terms of the scale of corruption in Ukraine compared to the previous years. It feels like up until recently, it was just a taboo to speak about.

It was just something that people rather would not look at or acknowledge because there was Russia's full-scale invasion happening. And I guess it was a very uncomfortable thing to think of, the fact that the corruption is still existing.

Jakub: It's kind of understandable that at the moment of the full-scale invasion, everyone's attention focused on defence.

But over the last couple of weeks especially, there's been more articles coming out and more discussions about potential issues of corruption. Do you feel like the taboo is breaking?

Anna: Yes, I do feel so. Because well, it's been almost a year since Russia unleashed its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And I guess to this point, civil society in Ukraine has already realised that the victory cannot be accomplished actually without proactive democratic society and watchdog agencies that are keeping track of public procurement, procurement for the military, et cetera.

People in Ukraine started realising that to actually contribute to the victory, civil society in Ukraine must watchdog the resources because these resources must better serve Ukraine's defence and not being funnelled somewhere else or being pocketed by some corrupt politicians or officials.

Anastasiia: I think it's also a matter of feeling the ground and getting used to the situation because I remember having discussions with journalists in Ukrainian media who've had certain content.

It was, I think, videos of the Ukrainian military perhaps doing something that could be allegedly illegal or something. And I had a conversation with a journalist who said that their newsroom decided not to publish it. That was in the early days.

And they mentioned how there was a whole conflict happening that some journalists were like, “No, this is our job. We have to keep the government to account.” But some journalists and perhaps the editors ultimately decided that maybe it's not the right time.

Anna you would know that it's really scary as well to publish these materials, not only because of potential government pushback or rich oligarchs hunting you down for the stuff that you wrote about them, but also the people.

I think a lot of journalists may also fear some sort of negative reaction, kind of like, “How dare you talk about this right now. Our military is dying for you and you're accusing them of stealing money.”

It can go all sorts of wrong ways. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it, but it's definitely an uncomfortable process right now

Anna: As we are speaking about the challenges journalists face as they're covering corruption or mismanagement of the government or well, the country’s establishment. I would probably take this chance to talk about the challenge I faced when we were considering to cover the story involving International Legion, which we first started looking into back in the end of summer.

We've received some information that International Legion, which is a part of both Ukraine's ground forces and military intelligence, was extremely mismanaged by their leadership, which was abusing their power, which was causing deaths of the servicemen.

But having received this information, we faced this moral dilemma as Nastya already said, when as a journalist in Ukraine, you are trying to weight all pros and cons and think about how this story would be perceived right now amid the war when Russia is an aggressor, which is trying to conquer your country.

And at the very same time, you know that there is something wrong happening in this very military in Ukraine, and you are trying to see how to pursue with this story.

So basically, I can share my thinking of myself and Olga Rudenko, our chief editor in the team who has been working on this story. What we took into consideration was the following.

First, at the very beginning of the full-scale invasion of Russia, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, addressed everybody in the world saying, “You guys, if you would like to help Ukraine's cause in defending itself, join International Legion.”

And we as the Kyiv Independent, published the story, like an explainer on how to join the Legion. When we received information that something was wrong inside the Legion, we started considering whether it serves public interest, and it did because we had an obligation before our audience to inform them on something we reported on in the past. And we said join because that's what Zelenskyy suggested.

But now we have some insider information coming in saying that it's not the great place to be and explaining why.

The second thing was the fact that this leadership mismanagement drastically affected servicemen. They wanted their stories to be heard and they wanted to bring change.

They had been knocking on the doors of every official in Ukraine, in the parliament, in the military, trying to attract attention to their problems. They weren't heard, journalists were their last resort.

And the important thing is here, that despite all the concerns about our safety by revealing mismanagement in the army, we still decided to do this story because well, in our opinion, it was actually contributing to Ukraine's victory because it was shedding light on something that is going wrong in the military.

And now is the time when you resolve these issues, when you repair what is broken, not after the war, because after the war it might be way too late.

Jakub: You can make the argument that this kind of stories are especially important to publish in a timely matter, because the people that might sign up to the Legion or who are currently serving in it could die because of the mismanagement, mishandling or malfeasance.

Anastasiia: I honestly think that Ukrainians are more scared of the way this would be perceived than anybody else, because I remember the comments under the story. All of the Westerners were to begin with shocked that we had the guts to do it and Anna, kudos to you and your team.

And they were all in awe that Kyiv Independent had the courage to investigate this and to publish this at such a time, because obviously the whole other side of this is Ukrainians are very scared, perhaps, rightfully so, that such reporting may impede the efforts to get as much aid as we possibly can and as many weapons as we can from the West.

And I've had this very annoying instance of a discussion like this when I was in DC and I was speaking at a Transparency International Conference and I mentioned this investigation because it just came a few weeks earlier. And I was explaining on a stage why this matters and why we did it.

Around that same time, at those same dates, there was a big delegation from Ukraine that was in DC. It was a lot of activists, some journalists, people from the Defence Ministry, et cetera, who were negotiating another military aid package.

A guy came up to me, he was a Ukrainian working within some sort of big international organisation, but Ukraine's office. He was like, “I really appreciated what you said and you guys did a great job, but you know there is a Ukrainian delegation in Washington right now. You know they're negotiating with the Biden administration and I just wanted to hear what you think about whether the timing may be a bit problematic here.”

And I was just annoyed to my core, because I was thinking, “Wow, you've really missed the entire point of my presentation, at this conference right now.” We have to show to the West that we're not just a corrupt country where officials run free stealing money.

We do have those officials, but we also have a whole bunch of people who are brave and intelligent and courageous, who try to fight these officials.

Anna: That is the argument sounding at the moment in response to the story which was broken by Yuriy Nikolov, a journalist who did the article for Zerkalo Tuzhnia, over the weekend. It was published, it was looking into military food procurement by Defence Ministry.

Basically, the essence of the story is that Defence Ministry signed a contract for the year 2023 for food, for the army, for the military, but not the army stationed on the frontline.

But those stations were far away from the active combat zones and some of the positions on this food list were higher in price than market prices in grocery stores, in say, Kyiv.

There was a document that got leaked to Nikolov and he published it with all the numbers that it had in it. The price for one egg in this contract was 17 hryvnia per item. While in a Kyiv grocery shop, that would cost something like seven.

Anastasiia: Okay Jakub, you are our money person. Is this really problematic or is there another explanation for something like this than wilful corruption?

Jakub: I personally don't think this is quite as big of a deal and here's why. So, when you are dealing with large scale procurement and you need to buy a bunch of different items for a bunch of different people, it's very easy to find yourself in this kind of situation.

One, it can be a mistake, maybe you didn't check what is the price and you're buying them in bulk. This is not a supermarket where you necessarily have comparisons next to the specific item.

If it was a tenfold increase, that would be really bad. You need to see how much spend essentially, he had, how big of a purchase he was making. Because if the… let's say the eggs and the procurement that was overpriced was in the 5% of the overall contract value, that's something that you might miss.

You're dealing with hundreds, thousands of different items that you're buying and the smaller purchases, you just kind of want to get them out the way.

There's also a second consideration, which is if you want to buy 12 eggs, you can go to any shop and presumably find them or go to a market, whatever.

If you want to buy, let's say 600,000 of those, the places that you can buy them from are much more limited. There's logistical considerations, there's timing considerations, eggs need to be refrigerated while they're transported.

And so, there's a lot of things that can influence the price and it might have been a case of carelessness or just not going the extra mile to do your due diligence and make sure that every single penny is spent as efficiently as possible.

But look, it is important to raise these questions now, and I was sort of thinking about two potential situations. One where all of the media decide to hold off on any reporting.

And look, the truth is a lot of media are making that decision right now. There's a lot of media that could be reporting on something uncomfortable and they're deciding not to.

And one where we sort of go and — just as before the war, report on any corruption or anything that seems suspicious and the answer is probably in the middle. If you hold off of anything, at some point these stories will break. And if they break like a flood, all of a sudden, the world decides, “Oh, my goodness, this thing was a giant scam.”

If we go and raise flags everywhere in a (I would say), non-judicious manner, there's a big risk that people will say, “Well look, there's corruption everywhere.”

The thing is, if you want to deal effectively with corruption, you do need to raise those examples. You do need to identify those examples, but you want to do this in a way that actually leads to results and sort of cleans the process.

Anastasiia: Another thing is Ukrainian journalists are not the only ones who are investigating these issues. So, if it is the Western journalists that are writing about corruption in Ukraine, it looks a hundred times worse than if our own guys are like, “Hey, we know that this is a problem and we're trying to take responsibility.”

Anna: I completely agree with Nastya and I also would like to add that as a Ukrainian journalist, you also know the context, you also know the background and you can better cover these issues because you have this knowledge of Ukraine and the track record of some corruption schemes and you can better explain why something is taking place.

Jakub: The other thing that I think is worth noting is (just to give our listeners a little bit of context), where is Ukraine coming from?

I first arrived to Ukraine in 2009 and believe me that corruption about egg purchases was the softest thing or the most trivial thing that you can imagine.

One of the first stories that I remember running into is: it's winter in Kyiv, none of the streets are cleaned from snow, none of the buildings have the ice removed. So, there's people dying every other day from icicles falling down and slipping on ice covered sidewalks and things like that.

So, the city is in a pretty bad state and the mayor is nowhere to be found. And then we hear a story about how his daughter is in Paris and her handbag is stolen with jewellery worth, I believe it was around 4 million euros.

Anastasiia: Oh, my God.

Jakub: Then we find out that the mayor is off on safari somewhere and then he's off on a beach in Israel. And the level of corruption and dysfunction that was taking place in Ukraine a decade ago is absolutely out of proportion with anything that you can imagine, was ridiculous.

Every single thing that you would do, you'd go to the office to get registered, passport controls on the border-

Anastasiia: Doctors.

Jakub: Doctors, university, everywhere you would have to pay a bribe, everywhere. What's the worst case of corruption that you remember?

Anastasiia: I don't remember that many cases because of my age, but the one that I think most of the people in my generation remember is obviously Yanukovych, and just everything about him, literally his body was the embodiment of corruption in Ukraine, I think.

Anna: An icon of corruption.

Anastasiia: Yeah. I literally imagine as if like a 15-year-old kid or as a 14-year-old kid, you go to a place where you are told that, “Okay, here's where your president lived.” And you walk around and you see a literal palace with gold everywhere and you read about it.

And you now see it being turned into a park and you have to wrap your head around like, “Wait, but this is not what my friend's houses look like. This is not how anything in my city looks like.” Yet, here is the person who was governing over us, here is how he lived. I think as a young person it really affects you.

Jakub: That's really the Kim Kardashian of corruption globally. I think in the documents that were found, there's so many cases there, but one that I remember is I think the squirrels.

So, he had imported squirrels on the territory of his residence and I think the budget for feeding them was several thousand euros a month.

Anastasiia: What?

Jakub: Some kind of special nuts or whatnot, which of course was several times the average Ukrainian salary back then, so yeah.

Anastasiia: For squirrels.

Jakub: For squirrels.

Anna: Ukraine has changed a lot since 2009, which is something we're discussing at the moment.

However, an important note here, I personally have this fear of Ukraine sliding back to something similar to what we had in 2009.

Anastasiia: Why?

Anna: Because of a lack of transparency, which exists right now. Look, public procurement, ProZorro, an amazing system which was put in place after the Euromaidan Revolution.

When there was huge demand and the society was hungry for reforms, people came up with this ProZorro system, which is public procurement website, where you can see the bidders and its transparent.

And for example, public asset declaration due to the war, right now, lawmakers don't have to file their asset declarations, hence law enforcement have no idea.

Anastasiia: That's really strange.

Anna: Well, it's not strange. Well, there is a reason to it because public declarations have all the information which could be sensitive.

Anastasiia: I see. Okay.

Anna: And amid the war well, lawmakers could be targeted by Russia for some specific laws that they're supporting in the parliament. So, it does make sense.

However, the point I'm trying to make is that the lack of transparency creates huge opportunity for mismanagement and corruption. And having this tradition in our country, I'm a little bit scared that some people can actually use this opportunity to pocket money and to just steal money or do whatever they want. And that is something that concerns me a lot.

I just hope that the majority of the Ukrainian civil society understand that whatever freedoms we have right now, we have thanks to these brave men and women standing on the frontline and defending us every and each day.

We as people who do not participate in the combat, have an obligation to be good because they're defending this democracy and we have to contribute as well.

And if somebody right now sees an opportunity to steal, I think it's worse than ever to steal in the country which is at war, which is being attacked and which has been defended by so many brave people.

And yeah I will say a cliche thing but people are dying for this country every single day and I think out of respect, people who see an opportunity, shouldn’t be doing any bad to this country because every single hryvnia must be paid to contribute to the victory right now.

Jakub: Listeners should realise just to what extent; I think Ukrainians hated the level of corruption that was plaguing the country for the last sort of 30 years.

Euromaidan was… I would say the number one reason that there was a revolution was corruption. But people hated it.

And by the way, when they actually went in and sort of checked the houses of the lawmakers that had fled after the revolution to Russia, there were photos of $200,000 watches, $50,000 watches, bricks of gold, suitcases full of euros.

And this is just the stuff that they didn't manage to make off with. This is the stuff that they had to leave because they didn't fit into their Maybach or their helicopter or whatnot.

And since then, Ukrainians have done so much to actually build a system that tries to bring this under control. You brought up ProZorro. This is actually a really impressive piece of e-procurement. I understand the fear of slipping back, but hopefully diligent and vigilant journalists will keep the public eye tracked on this.

Anna: And I think it's important to highlight here while we are speaking about that, the fact that during the past week there were so many investigative stories — some sort of corruption and mismanagement.

And the important thing which actually opposes my fear is that, well, there were many resignations after these stories. The dream of a journalist, when you do a story and then you see that it brings change or it contributes to change, and now these officials handed it their resignation letters.

So, I hope that it actually proves the point that there is hope for Ukraine and for everybody here, that Ukraine is actually very far away from Russia in terms of values and that corruption isn't being tolerated in our country, and that the officials understand that the war is not an excuse for not talking about these things. And that right now is definitely not the time for corruption or wrongdoings of any sort.

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: Anna, thank you so much for coming in. It was really interesting to listen to you.

Anna: Thank you for having me.

Jakub: Thank you so much for listening to Power Lines. We'll see you next week for our regular episode where we'll be looking at some of the people and organisations who are rebuilding Ukraine's infrastructure, both now and in the future.

Anastasiia: Power Lines is a partnership between the Kyiv Independent and Message Heard. It was produced by Bea Duncan, Harry Stott and Talia Augustidis. The executive producer is Sandra Ferrari. The theme music is by Tom Biddle and Alfie Godfrey.

Season 1 Episode 10

Speakers: Anastasiia Lapatina, John Spencer, Jakub Parusinski & Melaniya Podolyak

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: On August 4th, 2022, Amnesty International published a report, the title cut right to the point: Ukrainian fighting tactics endanger civilians. But the report was fraud from the outset.

Amnesty claimed that they had documented a pattern of Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when operating in populated areas. The backlash was swift.

Zelenskyy: [Speaking Foreign Language].

Anastasiia: That's President Zelenskyy, saying, there are no conditions, not even hypothetical ones, under which any Russian attack is justified.

He goes on to say that the report equated Russia and Ukraine's actions, that it painted the victim in the same tones as the aggressor.

This report is an example of one of the failures in the international humanitarian response to this war because no organization claiming to be on the side of aid, truth or civilians should have even dreamt of publishing it.

Hi, John.

John: Hello.

Anastasiia: Thank you so much for finding the time for us. I'm really excited to speak to you.

John: No, it's always an honour.

Anastasiia: John Spencer is an author, veteran, professor and one of the globe's leading analysts on urban warfare. He's also my friend, and I know that he's experienced first-hand how war functions in cities.

So, I wanted to speak to him about the report and to debunk its claims by showing how war actually plays out in urban environments. And he didn't pull any punches.

John: Yeah, so I was a little bit infuriated by the report for many reasons. One, that it was just full of ignorance on warfare, full of ignorance on the law of armed conflict and actually false claims.

It was actually reckless because it did have a huge impact on the global stage, to allow other people who aren't just informed on warfare in general.

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: One of the main claims made by the report was that Ukrainian armed forces put civilians in harm's way by “establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, including schools and hospitals.”

This just ignores the reality of urban warfare and well, the fact that the schools they mentioned were actually abandoned.

John: Russia is invading Ukraine with the objectives of all the urban areas. That's how you take a country, you seize the capital; you seize all the important urban areas. In order to stop that, in order to save your populations, you have to be in the urban areas to prevent them from being taken.

And then all the awful things that Russians do when they take the urban ground. The whole reason for the Geneva Conventions in the Post World War II things was to limit the impact of war on civilian populations, non-combatants.

And of course, everybody wants to reduce the impact, reduce explosive weapons and all this in the urban areas, but there's nothing in the law of armed conflict that says it's a violation of the law of war to be in an urban area.

And what Amnesty didn't clarify is like, okay fine, there are protected populations, non-combatants, and there are protected places like schools, churches, infrastructure. If you occupy them, then they lose their protected status. There's nothing that says you can't be in them.

Anastasiia: But even beyond the ignorance of how urban warfare works, the report contained a litany of spurious claims. Let's have a look at them.

So first, the report included the lie in; in two towns, dozens of soldiers were resting, milling about and eating meals in hospitals. This appeared to be the evidence of armed forces operating there. But in war, spaces like this are scarce. Where else were potentially injured, soldiers meant to rest and get food, if not in a medical centre?

The report also contained some interviews with civilians, but there was no methodology laid out at all about who was chosen or how this research was carried out. Another blind spot.

The report later accused the forces of not properly evacuating urban areas or to be precise, it says they were “not aware” if the military had asked or assisted civilians in the evacuation.

Clearly, this was not a report that was published in good faith. And anyway, throughout the war, the Ukrainian government actually has continuously done everything in its power to ensure evacuation of civilians.

John: The alternative from being in the city and being in the field is that you're dead. So, if the Ukrainian military would've been standing in the fields, firing a weapon, they would be dead. It's called counter-battery.

Anastasiia: Can you explain that a bit more?

John: Yeah. So, artillery or big mortars, artillery, multiple launch rocket systems, they need a firing location. And once they fire, they only have a matter of a minute, sometimes even less, to then move away from that area they're in. Because when they fire, they leave a signature, which a radar can pick up. And then the enemy, in this case, Russia, can then fire back and destroy that military force.

The field or the open area offers no protection, that's why war doesn't happen in the open fields. They're in as heavily amount of woods and trenches as possible. Especially when this report came through, Ukraine was doing anything it could, both the Ukraine military and the Ukrainian territorial defences and civilians to just save themselves, to hold the Russians off. Setting up in woods and trenches, that takes weeks and months.

Anastasiia: The day after the report was published, Oksana Pokalchuk, the Executive Director of the Ukrainian office of Amnesty International, resigned with many of her colleagues following suit.

Pokalchuk later wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, criticizing Amnesty and explaining her resignation. She wrote that the Ukrainian office was not properly consulted or included in the drafting of the report, showing what she described as a total disregard for the principle of international solidarity, proclaimed in Amnesty’s statute and the aim of amplifying local voices.

[Music Playing]

John: Urban warfare is a concrete war. Concrete protects your soldiers. Of course, all militaries have an onus to protect the civilian population, but also if they're trying to defend a piece of urban ground, where are you going to put your soldiers? Where they can't be seen and where they're protected from incoming aerial munitions.

Customary humanitarian law says avoid, limit, all that, the use of protected sites like churches and schools and things like that and infrastructure.

Anastasiia: And no one does that willingly, anyway. It's not like they’re searching around for a church or a school. As far as I understand, it's like the best that they’ve got.

John: That's a great point. And that's again, what's wrong with this Amnesty International report. There is intent.

So, there are military who will occupy a protected site because they know it's protected and the other military will limit the use of force against them.

There's nothing in that report that says that's what Ukraine was doing. Like they were purposely going into a school because they knew that Russia would follow law of armed conflict (insert laugh there), and not shoot at it.

Anastasiia: Many of the civilian buildings that Russia has targeted, a list as long as the days the war has gone on, so Kyiv, Dnipro, Polesia, Mariupol, Kherson and the rest have been justified by Russia as being controlled by the Ukrainian army, which is why ignorant reports like this are so dangerous. All Amnesty did was throw Russia a bone, a whiff of credibility to their propaganda.

John: I don't want to do what about isms. But there is law of war in discrimination, to discriminate between a military target and a civilian target.

And from day one, Russia has shown that they won't follow any … they actually target civilians or evacuating civilians like in Kramatorsk, at the train station. They'll target them on purpose, while the Ukrainian military does everything it can to protect civilians. It's so infuriating the claims or the innuendos that are behind this report.

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: Well John, thank you so much for coming in. It was really interesting to listen to you.

John: Thanks for having me.

Anastasiia: Amnesty's response to the backlash was a predictable non-apology. “We want to understand what exactly went wrong and why,” they said, “In order to learn lessons and improve our work in the field of human rights, the conclusions were not conveyed with the delicacy and accuracy that should be expected from Amnesty.”

But despite that, they said they fully stand by their findings. They have agreed to an external evaluation.

The international response to the war in Ukraine has been in the main, one of remarkable solidarity. Few international observers would have predicted that Western Europe, with all of its divisions, populist in the rise in economic strife, would have come together in such a united front to stand up to a country, they so rely on for energy to take an economic hit when already on the brink of recession.

Which is why the failures of humanitarian organizations like Amnesty and others, as we'll see later in this episode, are so depressing.

While probably not done with malicious intentions, there is no room for error when it comes to war. In its ignorance of the realities of urban warfare, in ignoring the voices of Ukrainians and publishing a report then taken up by the Kremlin's propaganda machine, Amnesty gave the Ukrainian people anything but aid and solidarity.

From Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent, you're listening to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World.

Jakub: In this series, we're going to be mapping the undercurrents and global consequences of the war in Ukraine, beginning in Kyiv and following the roads out wherever they may lead. I'm Jakub Parusinski.

Anastasiia: And I'm Anastasiia Lapatina. This week, we're exploring the role of humanitarian organizations in Ukraine, since the start of the full-scale invasion because maybe surprisingly there's been a fair bit of controversy surrounding many of the major international aid groups and their actions over the past year.

Jakub: One of the biggest shocks I think from the work of the international organization was of course, the report by Amnesty that you spoke to John about.

Anastasiia: Yeah, right. I remember when that report came out, Twitter went absolutely crazy. Everybody was commenting on it. And what was notable is that it wasn't just Ukrainians being upset that their country’s perhaps portrayed in a negative way, which that I guess in the circumstances that we are in would be somewhat understandable.

But it was also a lot of international experts, journalists, lawyers, saying that that report which alleged that there is a pattern, as the report says that the Ukrainian army isn't enduring civilians because of their tactics of urban warfare, that it was just outright wrong.

I'm pretty sure that a UN war crimes investigator said that the Amnesty International got the international law in that case wrong. That's pretty big.

Jakub: Yeah. So, looking at Amnesty and their work, but also more broadly at the international organizations, what I think is kind of worrying is we tend to think about these organizations as the safety net.

Anastasiia: Right.

Jakub: Whether they're helping people or they're reporting about human rights violations or whatever. They're the people who are supposed to catch the wrongdoings that are happening around the world and essentially try to amend them in some kind of way.

Anastasiia: Yeah.

Jakub: But that's not really what they do and that's not really how they're built. Looking at the experience from the war, it feels like a lot of these large organizations are very sclerotic. Like they know how to do a couple of showy tricks, write reports, do videos that make people cry.

Anastasiia: Yeah.

Jakub: But when it comes to actually doing something that leads to change, they're very weak.

Anastasiia: It was a very eye-opening experience for me, the Amnesty thing specifically, because I remember in my work and in my studies, usually when you analyse a particular conflict, of course you take into account the information that, for example, both governments that are involved in the conflict are saying, but you mainly trust the NGOs, whichever NGO that might be.

So, this really made me be even more cautious in all of the work that I do on anything political, frankly.

Jakub: Yeah. When I think about sort of what has gone wrong with the NGOs and all these international organizations, it feels to me like we've seen something that's very disappointing, which is a nice way to call it would be that they're very superficial. Basically, the purpose of Amnesty right now is to exist as Amnesty. It's not actually to change something.

I think there's good people there, but I think as an organization and many of these organizations are unfortunately like this, their core point of existence is to continue their own existence. 

Who did you talk to this week, Nastya?

Anastasiia: So, this week I was really, really excited to speak with Melaniya Podolyak. She's a pretty famous activist here in Ukraine. She's also a YouTuber and a key part of one of Ukraine's most effective and vital aid organizations, the Foundation of Serhiy Prytula.

Like with so many people, when the full-scale invasion began, Melaniya immediately pivoted to aid, joining the Prytula Foundation to run their Lviv charity hub, where they distribute aid donations from abroad to the rest of the country.

And the Prytula Foundation is a really amazing organization. It's Ukraine's second biggest military and humanitarian aid foundation, and they have a number of projects that bring aids to civilians as well as crowdfunding to get weapons to the Ukrainian army.

So, I wanted to start by asking her about how she pivoted to aid at the start of the war and what the response was like in those hectic early months of 2022.

[Speaking Foreign Language]

Alright, let's do a little part of this just about the beginning of the war. When the war began, where were you? What were you up to? And how did you react to the news?

Melaniya: It was very weird because a couple of days before the war, I went on air and I was convincing them that there was no war, that there's no war. Yeah.

Anastasiia: We've all been there.

Melaniya: Yeah, yeah. I was a big war denier-

Anastasiia: Me too.

Melaniya: Just because I guess I was trying to protect my psyche, even though everything screamed, there's going to be an invasion, but I was like, “Nah, come on.”

And then I went home and I had some friends and they were all sleeping over at my place, so I was like, I might as well not go to bed anymore.

And then we had the first Putin speech, the history lesson for the mentally insane, about everything.

And the second speech came, which was very — it was like four in the morning. And I was like, “What the hell did you not say, still? You've said everything.” And then I thought it must be a diversion. So, I thought they're doing terror attacks. Because they probably mined or planted bombs somewhere.

Because nobody in their right mind, you would agree, cruise missiles, unimaginable. Okay, invasion might have happened from the Donbas side and that also happened. True.

But nobody ever thought that they would strike Kyiv with cruise missiles. And I was on air with some other media in America trying to make sense of it all.

And they hear the air raid siren. And I just remember my face. I'm just scared shitless with like tears in my eye and they go, “How does it feel?” I'm like, “It feels really bad. I'm really scared.” They’re like, “Is it an air raid siren? Are you scared?” I'm like, “Yeah.”

And then maybe four hours later we started our first fundraising for the Kevlar Plates. Yeah. For the-

Anastasiia: I was going to say, do you remember what the situation was like in terms of humanitarian aid, in the first few weeks or the first few days of the war? Because I remember it was ridiculously hectic.

Melaniya: No, we were buying up everything we could get our hands on, anywhere. So, for the first maybe two weeks, I still was working kind of solo because the foundation was still getting together. And Kyiv was occupied and there wasn't much I could do, even though-

Anastasiia: So, you were just using your social media?

Melaniya: Yeah, yeah. I had friends in the military and so, we were fundraising for them to buy this Kevlar Plates that my friend Yura, that I didn't know back then. Because he lived in Czech Republic, now he's a friend.

But back then, I just got a call from this guy who said, “You're looking for Kevlar Plates, I have a shop here that has like 80 of them and it costs like 40,000 or something.” And we got that amount in like what? 20 minutes.

Anastasiia: Wow.

Melaniya: Yeah. April, May, even June, it was still ridiculous.

Anastasiia: Why was it so intense? Was it that there were just so much that was needed or there were difficulties with logistics or what was it?

Melaniya: The sheer volume. So, we were receiving aid from both organizations that we had agreements with. So, they were sending out medical aid, food, all sorts of clothing.

But we also had a lot of organizations that just volunteered to send these things. And it was just trucks on top of trucks on top of trucks. And I'm only talking about my logistics division. So, receiving and sending-

Anastasiia: Where it's needed.

Melaniya: Yeah. Where it's needed. So, Serhiy Prytula Foundation was founded in 2019 and had no intention of being a military foundation.

So, Serhiy used to be a volunteer on his own. He used to do his thing, he had his Patreon and he would regularly go to the frontline since 2014 doing his thing, which is great. But the foundation was made explicitly to help in the education projects, all sorts of inclusivity projects, children education-

Anastasiia: Just general-

Melaniya: General, yes.

Anastasiia: Philanthropy.

Melaniya: Philanthropy, exactly. When COVID hit, they helped with local hospitals and whatnot. So obviously, our machinery was not set up as well as other military foundations.

We had to literally invent a military foundation from scratch, even though we had a team, a team of very experienced people and everybody we knew kind of joined. But still, it was a lot of paperwork and a lot of what to buy, where to buy and stuff like that.

So, we were working 24/7 period and it lasted for a good six months. And then also, unloading trucks is something I never thought I would be doing. Because that's 20 tonnes of like food, 20 tonnes of like Kevlar Vests.

Anastasiia: And then you also have to sort it.

Melaniya: Yes, yes. Everything has to be sorted. Everything has to be written down. I'm actually very grateful, it's a good thing to do, especially for a person like me who's been very spoiled and I don't get to do a lot of manual labour, but it was A humbling, B actually necessary. And I felt like I was doing the right thing.

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: I remember discussing the beginning of the war with one of my friends and we talked about the fact that one of the reasons why we did so well compared to the Russians in the first few weeks or month, is because, because the situation was so chaotic, everybody in their own spaces and positions just took the initiative and took the responsibility. And all of their superiors allowed them to do that because they understood that we can't waste time.

And I think exactly the same thing was happening within the civil society. Everyone on my social media, regular people. But it is really true that the initiative to raise just ridiculous sums of money to buy the military aid, to buy food, to buy supplies, power banks, it all came from Ukrainians all over the country. It was so quick. I was stunned.

And now we joke that Ukrainians can crowd fund for pretty much anything, including nuclear weapons.

Jakub: Wow.

Anastasiia: You're not supposed to say wow, you're supposed to be a local in here. This isn't surprising to you.

Jakub: No, I expected you to go with something else than nuclear weapons. But when I think back to those times, it's all of this ground up efforts also led to a very … it was really all over the place.

I remember in the first couple of days as people were trying to buy bulletproof vests and we were all reading up on exactly what kind of protection you need, where and my goodness, I must have watched hours of videos on-

Anastasiia: Right, yeah. I remember.

Jakub: What's a level 3 plate? Level 3a, a four? Why don't they produce ones anymore?

Anastasiia: I remember this was so problematic because everyone tries to help, but these things can save your life, but they can also kill you if you don't know what you're buying.

I remember talking to a large international media NGO and they were asking whether the Kyiv Independent needs any support with the vests. And that conversation was happening at the end of May. Like that's nearly four months into the war.

And it's really surprising to me that that was the reality because the build-up on the border was happening for months. If you are an organization that's monitoring activity and possibly planning for conflict where you would be needed, I would assume they would start doing some preparations.

But it seemed like everyone was caught off guard, as if no one even predicted even remotely.

And what exactly is your job within the Prytula Foundation? What are you in charge of?

Melaniya: A whole bunch of stuff. Okay. So no, in the first couple of months, I was solely in charge of Lviv charity hub. So, Prytula Foundation has hubs in Kyiv, in Dnipro, in Lviv, in Mykolaiv. And so, our hub is almost exclusively designated to humanitarian aid in that sense of no-

Anastasiia: No military.

Melaniya: Military, yeah. However, still used the premises for Kevlar Vests and whatnot a lot of times. But mostly it was humanitarian aid. So, that was going on for a good six months I believe.

But also, we have a project within the foundation called NEST. We're building these modular temporary housing on the de-occupied territories. So, currently we're working in Makariv region, near Kyiv, because only there, there are 585 houses that were destroyed.

And we are only working with private homes. And the land has to be owned by the person. The reason we took that niche is because well, first of all, we cannot afford to rebuild apartment complexes. That's very expensive.

Anastasiia: That’s huge.

Melaniya: And that's not our profession. But also, in terms of legislation, most likely the government will not find a viable solution on how to cover the expenses for the people who lost their private homes.

And so, Makariv, it's a small-ish kind of hromada near Kyiv. 585 families lost their homes. So, that's around $12 million. And in the scale of the entirety of Ukraine, it goes into billions.

So, we cannot kind of do government's work here. They still will have to come up with solutions. But the way every charity in Ukraine works, especially now, is that we are like a helping hand. So, we take care of what we can take care of.

Anastasiia: What are some of the projects and perhaps type of aid that your organization delivered, that maybe were unexpected that that's necessary, but it in fact did have a big effect or some of the projects that you've been most proud of?

Melaniya: So, all of our projects are very important really. And they all make a difference definitely on the battle field, especially when we're talking about military aid.

For instance, reconstructing captured Russian war machines has worked out ridiculously well because we collect money for restoring them. And then we give them to Ukrainian military. I call it Russian lend lease for Ukraine. Yeah.

Anastasiia: That's amazing.

Melaniya: That’s just what it is. They just leave stuff when we just get it, it's fine.

Anastasiia: That's great.

Melaniya: Yeah. But also, in terms of humanitarian aid, we got a bunch of very specific requests during the time we were working in terms of humanitarian aid. So, we got a bunch of dog food once, and I was like, “Who would want dog food? That's weird.”

Somebody heard that we had dog food, and we got a whole bunch of requests for them because all these shelters who are under occupation, that is something that is a real problem. So, animals should be fed as well.

And then the other project, it did not came into fruition, but it was something that I was thinking about. There has been this issue of sex crimes on the occupied territories.

So, we have discovered that after the de-occupation, a lot of women needed the so-called Plan B medication really after the horrifying stuff that took place on the de-occupied territory.

So, I think there should be an organization there somewhere that should be taking care of that because nobody talks about these things. Again, it came as a shock to Europe and to the civilized world because people didn't talk about it before.

And then people would just have babies after being raped by the occupiers and then having to live with that trauma.

Anastasiia: And then they would go to Poland and they would run into issues of abortion being illegal, which is ridiculous.

Melaniya: Yes, exactly. So, it's a whole very, very sensitive topic that also arose after the 24th of February because I am, I like to think of myself as a well-informed person, never — as the same way with dogs, I did not think about that as a war issue. And it is (feminine hygiene), a war issue. So, it touches every single kind of sphere of a human life.

Anastasiia: Existence.

[Music Playing]

Melaniya: Yes.

Anastasiia: So Jakub, you know my mom is a volunteer and she delivers a bunch of aid all across Ukraine into the front lines and also in Irpin in Bucha, which is close to where we live. And there is like this kind of now famous building, for lack of a better word, in Irpin.

It is I think something like six-story high building, a residential building that was under a really, really heavy fire. And it's, I think the most destroyed housing complex in Irpin.

And she, a few months ago, got a message from a mother who apparently still lives in that building. And I remember my mom was so shocked, she went to deliver aid to them and she came back and she was like, “I don't understand how this is possible.”

She was really pissed at the government, like, “How is it the local government is allowing something like this to occur?” This really highlighted this problem to me that I think it's just impossible to keep up with the destruction. Right?

Jakub: Yeah.

Anastasiia: And I also haven't seen any NGOs that are helping with this on a large scale. Like we hear about deliveries of food, deliveries of medicine, but is there some sort of big global rebuilding initiative? I don't think there is.

Jakub: Now that I think about it, I've seen and heard shockingly little. My understanding of the main sort of people who are delivering support to Ukrainians who have lost their homes right now are the people of Poland and neighbouring countries. It's individuals.

Anastasiia: Yeah, that's true. We are housing a person in our house.

Jakub: Exactly. So, my wife's family is from Dnipro. Part of them are not in Dnipro. Part of them unfortunately are still there and there are people staying there because a lot of the people who fled from the eastern side fled to the Dnipro, to Kharkiv, to Zaporizhzhia.

But maybe this is actually something that's so big. I don't think any of the international organizations can even step in to do it. It's beyond them.

Anastasiia: That's really sad. I try to stay positive, thinking that yes, there's all this destruction, but we're going to build better houses, we're going to build better schools, better hospitals.

[Music Playing]

And that is true. A lot of this infrastructure that's destroyed is soviet and ugly and not practical and breaks down and we are going to build back better. But I can't even imagine how long it's going to take.

What are your thoughts about the work of international organizations in Ukraine? This is a big part of what we wanted to discuss today because there have definitely been a lot of stories that have been largely criticism of the fact that perhaps some of these NGOs are overly bureaucratic or sometimes slow or for safety reasons, the fact that they're operating abroad, they can't quite reach the communities that are near the frontline, et cetera.

So, have you noticed some difficulties and some problems?

Melaniya: It all boils down to this, Russian-Ukrainian war of 2022 has definitely been the most covered war in the history of the world. And I mean TV, internet, news, bloggers. And because it is so covered, it has shown significant issues in the work of those big famous NGOs. Because usually they would operate very like out of sight, out of mind. They would do their thing.

Anastasiia: Kind of in the background, in the shadows.

Melaniya: Yes. In the background. So, people know what they do. So, people just assume it works fine.

And then these organizations come to Ukraine and some of them show ridiculously good results like World Central Kitchen, God bless these people.

But then also, you can see how the other organizations don't meet those expectations and evidently don't do as good of a work. And people start to question whether these organizations have been effective at all.

And they're not always prepared to bring people what people actually need. There was this very infamous case, I think with the Red Cross where they brought water to Dnipro, bottled water, which was ridiculous because first of all, there was a water shortage problem in a different part of a country, which was Mykolaiv back then.

Second of all, Dnipro is called Dnipro because it has a river, like a huge river flowing right in the middle of it.

In some other situation probably, I wouldn't mind, but people were very, very angry because people were already very tired with the war and war efforts. It was just the frustration and they did not do well in terms of communicating what they meant to with that water.

Anastasiia: So, do you think the problem in many cases is just the lack of communication with the locals and the lack of understanding what it is that people really need?

Melaniya: Yes. And also lack of understanding of the part of the world they're in, because for instance, some of them did not have an understanding of why would we send food to the bread basket of Europe.

Anastasiia: What? That’s stupid.

Melaniya: Yeah. And then I would have to explain that because the bread basket part is occupied currently, so we might have food shortages.

And so, it seemed to me sometimes that some of them did not do much research. I don't blame them because again, it all goes from the higher ups. But then again, I do not know what their big budgets were actually used for.

Not all of them are bad, I swear to God. I make it sound like just they're horrible. They're not, some of them are doing very well. Especially, the World Central Kitchen, I'm a big fan. If you're listening guys, I love you. Yeah. But other than that, yeah, there have been issues.

Anastasiia: Maybe we should talk about Red Cross because there totally have been some quite negative discussions on the Ukrainian side about the work of the Red Cross, about the fact that it seems to me like they almost promise or pledge to do certain things and then underdeliver.

We've heard so many stories from families of Ukrainian soldiers that are kept in captivity who would appeal to the Red Cross to come and visit them in Russian prisons. And supposedly the Red Cross has all the access in the world, but in reality, most often the Red Cross isn't there and has no access. Or if they do, it's extremely limited and it ends up just being not really productive.

So, what's happening there? Is it the problem of the Red Cross or is it the problem of Russia that just doesn't let them do their job?

Melaniya: It's actually both, which is an uncommon position to take.

Anastasiia: That's true.

Melaniya: But bear with me. So obviously, Russia does not want anybody to have access to anything they do. We know that. I don't know even how to call them at this point. It's terrorists, whatever.

They do not want anybody to see anything. So, obviously they will not let anybody in even when they promise, because we know what Russian promise is actually worth, nothing.

However, it doesn't mean that the big organization like Red Cross should come to the figurative gate, knock once, have a refusal and leave. It's not like we tried once and we didn't get access, so we left. No, that's not how any of this works.

You then report these things, you then keep doing these things. It's not even that, maybe they did, but we don't know. And that's where the problem arises. That's why the public gets frustrated.

Because I can't know what they do over there. Even though we've had so many reports saying that they never actually went anywhere, that they did nothing. That people in the Ukrainian side have seen them just stumble awkwardly and then leave with no actual communication and not even trying to get in.

Anastasiia: On the other hand, there have been reports of them working quite actively on the occupied territories.

Melaniya: Exactly. But that also goes underreported from their side. So, we actually don't even get information from them. They cannot even inform us on what they do and what they don't do.

And this is where transparency comes from. This is why Ukrainian NGOs have all the trust and the Red Cross doesn't because if you do something, you report. If you try to do something and you fail, you also report, you have to do it.

You promised you would monitor; you promised you had all these communications with Russians, and we see you operate on the occupied territories. So, please explain to us how is it that then our prisoners of war come back and say, “We've never seen a Red Cross representative, once.”

Anastasiia: Yeah. That's ridiculous.

Melaniya: It's okay to not be able to do something when working with Russia. I know that, everybody knows that. It's just a matter of — because they seem to pretend like it's nothing. And it's not nothing, it's everything, it's everything.

Anastasiia: Like Russia has the right.

[Music Playing]

Melaniya: Yes, yes, yes.

Anastasiia: Okay. So, the Red Cross.

Jakub: Sucks. Sorry, that was-

Anastasiia: So, the Red Cross sucks. Okay. So Jakub, before the war, have you heard anything negative about the Red Cross? Like now all Ukrainians dislike it strongly, but was this an issue before in other countries?

Jakub: I think yes, but it wasn't quite as tangible. But then when you look at how it's working on the ground, I think that's when you get really disappointed.

The thing that is the most amazing for me is that the Red Cross has knowingly or unknowingly, essentially sided with a genocidal campaign to remove Ukrainians and children into Russia and to make them disappear as Ukrainians.

Whether it's being killed in the filtration camps or being Russified, being sent to Russian families. They've had a hand in that.

Anastasiia: You should unpack that because I think the majority of people abroad have no idea. You mean that like they've been present on occupied territory and have provided food and transportation to evacuate people to Russia?

Jakub: Yes. So, since the beginning of the war, Russia has sort of argued that well, Ukrainians actually want to live in Russia, they want to be part of Russia, whether that's in Russia or in occupied Ukraine.

And so, they've played up the amount of people that have been fleeing through Russia, which for a lot of people who wanted to get out of the fighting areas, that was the only option.

All the roads towards Ukraine were cut and they had to flee, a lot of them sort of went all across Russia and then went through Finland or through Kazakhstan or whatever just to get out. But their only escape from the fighting was via Russia.

Anastasiia: And this was completely Russia's fault by the way, because they would either not allow to evacuate to Ukraine or they would literally fire with artillery at the green corridors that Ukraine has arranged with Russians. And a lot of people get killed this way.

Jakub: Absolutely. And there were shootings of civilians were absolutely the commonplace, almost policy by the Russian troops. And what the Red Cross did was to try to essentially open sites on the Russian side, to help with the refugees that legitimize these as humanitarian corridors.

Now, everything that we hear from, I would say, very knowledgeable sources about what is happening on the Russian border is that first of all, there are filtration camps where men and women of military age and physique are either arrested or in some cases disappear. And children who are passing through are taken away from their parents and sent to Russian families.

This is something that falls very clearly into genocide. All the experts are sort of clear about that, essentially removing children from an ethnic group and Russifying them. And there's no two ways about it.

Now, the Red Cross sort of acting and sort of getting involved in that is an element of legitimizing it. And so, it's either extremely foolish on behalf of their leadership or it's just completely immoral.

Anastasiia: Do you remember that whole thing about the Red Cross in Russia, their local Red Cross office fundraising money for the Russian military and for their families? It's preposterous.

Jakub: Yeah. It was just so disappointing to see.

Anastasiia: How is that even possible? How is the Red Cross brand not appalled?

Jakub: It's kind of incredible to think that they went with a campaign called My vmeste, which means we are together at a time that, like let's sort of build solidarity with the troops that are in Ukraine, butchering its people because it's such a tough national experience.

As far as I understand, the international offices of the Red Cross sort of distanced themselves from it and claim that like, “Look all of these national organizations are kind of independent.”

Anastasiia: Well, that's a shitty model of governing an organization, if you ask me.

Jakub: It's called a franchise model. If you want to run a franchise, which is essentially a fundraising franchise and where I'm sure a lot of the national units are fantastic and do absolutely great thing, well you're also going to be paying the price for the worst unit.

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: Okay. Let's talk about weapons for a bit. Do you think … because in Europe there's and in America probably as well, there's definitely a distinction between helping Ukraine with humanitarian aid and military aid.

For example, in Germany, this divide is very, very vivid. For some reason people can't rub their head around helping the military because that's somehow unethical. But they're okay with sending bandages and food and clothing.

Do you think the world should see military aid as humanitarian, in a way?

Melaniya: Yes. No, absolutely.

Anastasiia: Why?

Melaniya: Because first of all, even when you are donating to a military NGO, you are never directly donating to procure arms, offensive arms. That is almost never the case.

Anastasiia: So, how does it work?

Melaniya: Bulletproof vests, night vision goggles, all sorts of equipment, reconnaissance drones are considered a humanitarian aid. They're there to protect military personnel and help them do their job. Bulletproof vest does not kill another person, it protects the person who's wearing them.

Anastasiia: It actually saves lives.

Melaniya: Yes. When we talk about specific, for instance, like our foundation, yes, we have fundraised to purchase, to procure a Bayraktar, which is a drone that actually is made to kind of change the situation of battlefield, if I may speak that way.

Yes. But that was a special occasion. It was announced very specifically. And of course, if people don't feel like donating to procuring arms, they shouldn't. Even though I keep telling people that if we don't get weapons, there will be no people to supply with humanitarian aid. It's not a matter of either/or.

People seem to think that if Russia occupies the entirety of Ukraine or like some part of it by sending humanitarian aid like food and medicine, that those things would reach Ukrainians on the occupied territories somehow.

We all know that's a lie. It would never, because all of the good stuff that was ever found on the occupied Ukrainian territories, including stuff we were sending there after the occupation, it all ended up in Russian hands and transferred to Russia because that's what they do, scorched or tactic and leave nothing behind. They don't care.

So, it's a matter of Ukraine winning the war because that way you will have somebody to feed, which sounds horrible, but that's true.

Anastasiia: But that's the truth.

Melaniya: That's why Bucha was so important for people to see because they thought that Russians just go to someplace and occupy it and it's a government change, lives go on.

No, it's not. And that's why helping Ukraine procure or advocating for Ukraine to get weapons from our partners is essential in any humanitarian effort. And I know it might feel a bit unethical to donate to something that can and they know help murder a Russian soldier.

But by not donating and by donating to something else, a Ukrainian soldier dies as well.

Anastasiia: Or a civilian.

Melaniya: Definitely, a civilian because Ukrainians don't kill civilians. That's the whole difference.

Anastasiia: Yeah. So, we've gone over the criticisms of the work of international organizations. Do you see some sort of similar criticisms with the Ukrainian NGOs or do you think overall they're performing better?

Melaniya: Overall, Ukrainian NGOs are performing way better. Obviously, we have our issues. We're much more mobile than any other big charity from abroad. We know people on the ground.

We are very well informed of the needs both military and civilian needs. We have every single foundation and even small group of people who just volunteer for a good cause, they have A, this grid of connections, of verification process. These days, everybody's very cautious about who they collect money for, who they donate to.

Anastasiia: Yeah.

Melaniya: Yeah. And then by donating to Ukrainian kind of charities here, you also bring money to Ukraine, which also helps.

On the other hand, we don't have the budgets, we don't have the institutional kind of experience they have, because some of these organizations exist since World War II.

Anastasiia: I was going to say, what do you think they should be doing differently, to do a better job?

Melaniya: They should talk to us.

Anastasiia: And they don't?

Melaniya: They don't, no. And they shouldn't talk to us in a way like, “What do you need?” It's, “How do you guys work?”

Anastasiia: How should we work here?

Melaniya: How should we work, yeah. For a lot of people abroad, we went to United States, a couple of weeks ago, and for a lot of people it was very interesting about, “How do you guys communicate with the military? Like here in the U.S. we don't talk to military.”

But it's doable. It's possible. I have a lot of friends who are volunteers now, who haven't had friends in the military before, so I wish they would just not just listen to us in terms of what we need, but also just listen to our experience. They would find it handy.

So, the scope of work goes so far beyond delivering physical goods to people. And this can also be a charity. This is also for NGOs to do. There is so much more beyond sending canned food. And with the resources some of the international organizations have, I think they should take note.

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: That's a perfect way to end this, I think.

Melaniya: Yeah, I think so too.

Anastasiia: Melaniya, thank you so much for coming on. It was really interesting to listen to you.

Melaniya: Thank you. Thank you for having me. And thank you for listening to me complaining for an hour.

Anastasiia: Jakub, you are a business person. You know how to run companies. So, if you had a global international NGO trying to do philanthropy and help people, what would you do differently? How would you be different from the Red Cross?

Jakub: It’s a difficult question because I don't think there is a silver bullet, but what I think comes out from what we've seen during the war, there is a lot of power in really bottom-up initiatives that are able to scale.

So, when I think about who should be actually doing it, in times of crisis, you have these great people who rise up and who really address it.

Now, I guess the question that I have is if I'm thinking from the international organization perspective, do I want to be a financing vehicle or do I want to be an operational vehicle? Right?

Anastasiia: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jakub: Do I actually want to hand out the aid myself or just sort of support, like the Red Cross could have given half of the money to Prytula, and he probably would've used it in more helpful ways, right?

Anastasiia: Right. Or if you claim to be somebody like the Red Cross, who we tend to think is like the universal aid organization that helps in conflict. And if you are in a war zone, you can always find the Red Cross and they can always help you. Like maybe if you advertise yourself as that, actually be present in the toughest spots.

Jakub: Exactly. Looking forward at what is the coming decade going to bring to us, I can't help but think that this should be a big lesson for all of the international organizations, that the world is becoming more unpredictable and we need to prepare for that.

And we need to prepare for that in ways where it's not like we build something that is very sclerotic and all over the place, but rather things that are nimble, that can adjust quickly, because that's the challenges that we're going to run into.

And I think there's a lot of fantastic people working in this sector and there's a lot of great organizations, but they need to really think about, “Well, how do we prepare for the unforeseeable? How do we sort of take the learnings of the war and use them to improve who we are and what we do?”

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: In two weeks in Power Lines, we're starting a two-parter to end our first series. As the year anniversary of the full-scale invasion comes around, we want to look to the future, to see how Ukraine is planning to rebuild itself on two fronts.

First, we'll be looking at the rebuilding of physical infrastructure. Our final episode, though, will explore how the nation will reconstitute its identity after the psychological trauma of war.

Jakub: If you want to support us, you can subscribe to our ad free feed on Apple and by looking up Power Lines + on Spotify.

You can also support the Kyiv Independent by finding us on our Patreon, to get behind the scenes content. Go to patreon.com/kyivindependent to continue helping us report on the most important stories in Ukraine.

Anastasiia: Look up Message Heard wherever you're listening to this podcast, for more of our original shows. And find us on our website at messageheard.com or on our Power Lines Twitter @PowerLinesPod, as well as Instagram and Facebook by looking up at Message Heard.

Jakub: You can also follow the Kyiv Independent on Twitter and Facebook at Kyiv Independent and Instagram at kyivindependent_official to get the latest news and stay up to date with our coverage.

Please also subscribe and rate Power Lines in your podcast app, as it really helps others find our show.

Anastasiia: Power Lines is a partnership between the Kyiv Independent and Message Heard. It was produced by Bea Duncan, Harry Stott and Talia Augustidis. The executive producer is Sandra Ferrari. The theme music is Tom Biddle and Alfie Godfrey.

Bonus Episode 9

 Power Lines Season 1 Episode 9 Bonus Transcript

[Music Playing]

Jakub: Hello listeners, welcome to your bonus episode of Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World.

Anastasiia: Today we're going to do something a little different, because instead of providing an extended version of the interview as we would usually do, we asked you for your questions about Russia's Intelligence Services.

Jakub: And we got a whole range of questions. From how many are nepo babies?

Anastasiia: What is it? What is that?

Jakub: It's a TikTok term for people who are like children of celebrities and who are celebrities themselves, basically.

Anastasiia: Okay.

Jakub: I'm explaining 20-year-old culture to-

Anastasiia: Yeah, I didn't mention that I'm domesticated, like I don't know trends anymore.

Jakub: For the people who don't see us and who have maybe missed the earlier episode, I am considerably older than Nastya. And definitely not in the generation that there's videos about nepo babies on TikTok.

Anastasiia: Well, you learn something new every day.

Jakub: So anyways, we got a whole range of questions from how many are nepo babies to is Russian Military Intelligence an oxymoron?

Anastasiia: Yeah. A lot of people ask that question. Just a disclaimer before we get into the questions, neither of us are experts, neither of us are Michael Weiss.

But we do know the local context and we obviously follow this issue quite closely. So, just keep that in mind.

[Music Playing]

Jakub, so the first question is really key here. James is asking, “How is it that people keep falling out of windows in Russia?”

Jakub: Obviously, there's some very serious issues with health and safety standards.

Anastasiia: Definitely.

Jakub: As well as building standards, et cetera. But more seriously, I don't think that all of the people falling out of windows or being defenestrated to take the technical term, this is not all Putin. This is not all them Intelligence Services.

Anastasiia: Really?

Jakub: Russia is a pretty lawless place, if you think about it. Crime has gone down around the world over the past couple of decades. It used to be much higher than it is today.

One place where that trend hasn't happened as much is Russia. And for all of this sort of senior executives who are dying all over the place from multiple gunshot wounds to the heads that are ruled as suicides or falling out of windows or things like that, a lot of it is just their rivals, the local gangsters.

It might be people in the Intelligence services, but it might be not for political reasons. It might be because somebody gave a bribe to somebody or made off with some money.

So, I'm sure that there are political assassinations and in fact we have some pretty credible cases of those, but I think a lot of them are just Russia being Russia.

Anastasiia: That's extremely well said. What's our next question?

Jakub: Well, our next question comes from Dmitry Nabokov who asks, “Do Western Intelligence Services have sources in the Russian Intelligence Services?”

Anastasiia: I think this one is pretty straightforward because probably all countries in the world have spies everywhere else, but especially if we're talking about the U.S. and Russia, I am 100% sure that they've infiltrated each other.

There was a story actually in 2019, I think CNN released an article saying that some of their sources told them how the U.S. got one of its top spies out of Russia because they were scared that Trump's kind of attitude with the Intelligence Services and his mishandling of the services and their jobs would end catastrophically for the spy.

So, the U.S. extracted one of its like highest level spies from the Russian government. And this was some sort of super-secret mission obviously, and I'm pretty sure this wasn't confirmed by either sides.

But since these case studies and articles and leaks exist, you can probably be sure that something like this is going on. It's pretty obvious, isn't it, Jakub?

Jakub: Yes. So, we actually have cases that are pretty well known of Western services running agents within the Russian services.

Very famously there is the case of Oleg Gordievsky who was actually the KGB resident-designate and bureau chief in London for a while. And he was a double agent working for the British MI6, for over a decade, which was a huge success.

You can actually read quite a detailed account of his life and sort of the work with Gordievsky in a book by Ben Macintyre, which came out a couple of years ago. It's called The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, recently finished it as an audio book and highly recommended.

More recently you have the case of Sergei Skripal, who also was double agent in the Russian Military Services.

So, the answer is definitely yes. But to what extent is something that is a closely kept secret.

Anastasiia: Another kind of point of discussion that people would mention when the war began is that how come the U.S. Intelligence just can't know Russia's next move? Or how come they can't predict exactly what Putin is going to do next? Because everyone sort of assumes that the U.S. has this spy networks and signal intelligence, et cetera.

But the truth is Putin's circle is extremely tiny. As far as I understand, not even most of his military generals knew what the heck they were doing until the very, very last moment.

So, how far do you have to go as a double agent or as a spy to really know what's in Putin's head? Like the circle is probably what, two/three people?

Jakub: Absolutely. It's one thing to sort of have a view of what's happening on the ground in, in some country or like some limited operations, but having people who are deep in Putin circle is a completely different one. And given how paranoid everyone must be over there; I think that's rather difficult.

The other thing is, and here I'm obviously guessing, but I can imagine that there's a lot of cases where the people around Putin prepare different scenarios of moving forward and he makes a final decision.

Anastasiia: On his own?

Jakub: On his own, at the last moment. Even if he sort of has a couple of advisors, that's a decision that's made very late in the game. So, you can sort of guess like what are the scenarios that are being prepared, but you might not be able to say what will finally be done, because that's something that Putin will decide in a mercurial fashion. It's difficult to get inside his head.

Anastasiia: The next question is slightly connected. It's from Marcus D, “Have Russian Intelligence agents defected in Ukraine, like they have done in mass, in other countries?” Jakub, have you heard stories like this?

Jakub: Not really. We have heard a bit of stories and my sense as well from the interview with Michael Weiss was that there have been defections, especially to the various international services.

If I had to guess, I'd probably say there's fewer defections to Ukraine for two reasons. One is that if you want to defect, you have to do that physically. Like you have to somehow communicate your intentions and show up somewhere and my guess is that it's very difficult to communicate to Ukrainian government officials for Russian government workers.

Anastasiia: I'm also not sure how safe staying in Ukraine would be. Like if you're going to a NATO country, if you're going to an EU country, you can assume some kind of level of safety that that country can provide for you. And that's the reason why many of these defectors choose those countries.

But if you go to Europe, I'm not sure our security services are paying as much attention to defectors and not to Russian spies that are still operating within Ukraine, for example.

There also may be some sort of retribution, we may be not really interested in working with them, right?

Jakub: There's definitely that, although I think a lot of the people in the Intelligence Services would be pragmatic.

But I think it's just technically more difficult to do that with a country that you are in an active war. There's also, as you mentioned, like look, Ukraine, there's a war zone. There's the front lines, but there's people operating all over the place.

And we have a case from a couple of months ago where, this wasn't a spy or anything, but this guy who was working for Vagner was killed with a sledgehammer-

Anastasiia: Right.

Jakub: In a very sort of ISIS style video.

Anastasiia: Very graphic.

Jakub: If you can get kidnapped on the streets of Kyiv, that's probably not somewhere where you want to be if you're a Russian defector.

Anastasiia: Right.

Jakub: Our next question comes from Matthew Townsend who asks, “What is the history of tension between the Russian military and the FSB?”

Anastasiia: This is actually really interesting because when I was researching this one, it looks like, well, of course this whole field is very secretive and there isn't much info that we know for sure, et cetera.

But especially this rivalry between the different Intelligence Services, it's not really well covered. Like I haven't found like a single book for example, or like an article that analysed specifically that.

But you can still gather some info from reporting within Russia and outside of Russia too. There is a very obvious rivalry that's been going on since like the 2000s when Putin came to power and it's mainly just for his praise, but that's not like a symbolic kind of thing, but it's very pragmatic. It's money and it’s resources, right?

Jakub: You're absolutely right. You can probably go back a little bit to the Soviet era and try to extrapolate.

So, back then, I mean basically a lot of the analysts were sort of pointing out that the Soviet dictatorship was based on having different centres of power, one of them being the party, the other one being the KGB.

And then the army. And the army was the biggest and had a lot of physical resources to ex deploy violence, but wasn't really connected to sort of political issues. Then the party was kind of the opposite and the KGB was kind of in the middle.

Dictatorships tend to be based on this kind of rivalry between different institutions. So, I would assume that there's a little bit of that going on still today.

There's also an interesting question to where does the GRU fit in with that? And most of the accounts of Russian Intelligence Services talk about the GRU and the FSB or the KGB earlier talking about each other as neighbours, near neighbours, further away neighbours.

So, there does seem to be a little bit of camaraderie between the service as well, but I'd expect that they're quite competitive between each other.

Anastasiia: So, even though the GRU and FSB in principle are separate organizations, because the FSB mainly works domestically or within the post-Soviet space, because as we said in the main interview, they kind of take the word domestic in the Soviet sense still. The GRU works with the military and it works abroad most often.

So, by definition they seem to have very separate responsibilities, but in practice it's not always that way. And very often their boundaries of work are blurred and they often work with the same networks, for example. And they compete for those networks and they compete for resources because they can work in the same territory, for example, and they have similar operations and they try to undercut each other.

And there have been stories, I'm not sure how much they are a conspiracy theory, but there definitely have been media speculations about the GRU and the FSB kind of undercutting each other and leaking information about each other's operation to the authorities and stuff like that. So, there definitely is some rivalry going on.

Jakub: So, they actually run into each other and sort of undermine each other in practice.

So, there was this case where the FSB essentially forged a document to try to undermine relations between Ukraine and Turkmenistan. Turkmenistan being a major gas supplier and sort of strategically important Central Asian country.

And basically, the document described that Ukrainian services were financing the Turkmen opposition and the SVR, which is the Foreign Intelligence Service, accidentally found this report and reported it as being authentic in the Kremlin. And so-

Anastasiia: That's so funny.

Jakub: Yeah, they definitely do undercut each other, whether by accident or by purpose.

Anastasiia: During the big negotiations that we had to bring back Azov fighters and have a swap with Medvedchuck, the GRU was the one that was dealing with Medvedchuck and the FSB was the one that was dealing with Azov.

And the Ukrainian government said that it was like literally two different groups of people were negotiating and that's why it took so long.

Jakub: I think actually Ukraine has been quite adept at exploiting this kind of rivalries between different Russian services and different groups.

I haven't really heard about specific examples with the Intelligence Services, but I remember early on in the first sort of weeks and months of the war when there were a lot of Chechen troops being moved in and there was this quite senior commander that was killed, there was a lot of chatter on telegram, which experts sort of attributed to coming from the Ukrainian Intelligence Services, about how the FSB is leaking the location of Chechen fighters to the Ukrainian Intelligence Services, because they want to get rid of a rival.

Anastasiia: That's crazy.

Jakub: Now, if you are Chechens, whether you believe that or not, the mood suddenly becomes a lot more sour.

So, I think Ukraine has been quite adept at manoeuvring around these different rivalries. We don't really see a lot, but my guess is that under their service, they're operating pretty smoothly, to make the best of this situation.

Anastasiia: Also, just a note, when we say Chechens, we actually mean people of Kadyrov because they … like actual Chechens hate everything about Russia, obviously because of the two wars that destroyed any hope that they had for democracy and freedom. So, when we say Chechens, we mean the army of Kadyrov.

Jakub: Yeah, that's a really important thing to point out. Thank you, Nastya.

Anastasiia: The next question that we have is from Maliek Banat, who's actually my friend, because both of us started in journalism almost at the same time. We were interns at the Kyiv Post before we were all fired.

So, two years ago he was there on my first day in Kyiv Independent’s newsroom. So Maliek, hello. Maliek’s question is, “Is Putin being misled by intelligence to please on the battlefield?”

So, I think this rivalry in a way feeds into that, doesn't it Jakub? Because you really want to please the Tsar and you do whatever you can. And if that is undercutting your opponents in a way, if that's feeding specific information from specific networks that is similar to the other Intelligence Service, then you are going to do whatever you can.

Jakub: So, there definitely seems to be cases of that this survey that was produced about the Ukrainian attitudes towards Russia and potential Russian rule would say quite an explicit example of that.

And if you look at the reporting of Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, who are two expert journalists covering the sector, it seems that the FSB has done this on multiple occasions.

Again, this is something that is quite difficult to judge, but my sense is that the GRU is seen as more reliable and in cases where operations have gone badly or it has seemed like things are getting a little bit out of hand, we've seen sort of GRU being sent in to take control and take over from the FSB, which again suggests that they seem to be more competent.

Anastasiia: We have another question from somebody called Snappy Goose who's asking, “Are Russian Intelligence Services spying agencies or as seems to be the case, do they spend more of their time trying to undermine change and modify public opinion and governmental policy?” This is a really good question.

Jakub: That is an excellent question.

Anastasiia: I think it mainly depends on the agency. So, if we're talking about the FSB, which mainly works domestically, then yes, they spend a lot of time controlling domestic moods because the FSB is the most direct successor of the KGB in a way that they're the governmental agency that controls opposition and squashes opposition.

So, if you want to talk about trying to change or modify public opinion or kind of restrict the society in a way from being exposed to certain opinions, then the FSB spends a lot of time doing that.

And at the same time, spying and trying to undermine or control public opinion, those are not exclusionary of course, right?

Jakub: Yeah, absolutely.

Anastasiia: For example, in Crimea, the FSB is the main body that persecutes Crimean Tartars in Crimea, and they don't do that out of thin air, though the accusations are, but they still do it only after spying on these people.

They spy on them, they listen on their discussions, they get into their private chats, into their private messages and they use all of that that they find as a result of the spying to try to pressure them and to persecute them, just so there isn't this kind of like oppositionary mood in Crimea.

So, I think in terms of FSB, in my mind it's really a very evil institution that combines spying with some sort of like social engineering almost, if you will.

Jakub: The famous active measures.

Anastasiia: Yeah.

Jakub: We definitely see Russian Intelligence Services do a lot of that, whether it's the cyber warfare, the misinformation, the hacking, the getting involved into different politics. And compared to other, well, especially western agencies, it seems like they are much more on the side of proactively trying to shape the situation rather than just collect data.

There's also a sense, and Michael was talking about this, that the GRU at least, and I assume the FSB as well, are at a state of perpetual war.

Anastasiia: Right, yeah.

Jakub: There's no peace time for them. And so, they're constantly trying to sort of get as much of an advantage on their opponents as possible.

So, we do see that, but to what extent does that mean that they don't really do as much of the spying? It's more difficult to say, they certainly seem to be doing it less effectively than-

Anastasiia: Than they could have.

Jakub: Yeah. It's really costing them something. So, Mark Strathan asks why the West has not treated them like gangsters after Salisbury, Litvinenko, et cetera, et cetera?

Anastasiia: Well, I think it's the same discussion as we had with terrorism. Like, you can't really treat the Intelligence Services of the biggest country in the world, which is one of the main international players both politically and financially as gangsters.

It's not an assumption that you can make, you have to continue pretending like they're your equal in a way. On the political stage, on the diplomatic stage.

Jakub: To some extent, they have been treated like gangsters, at least after Litvinenko and especially after Skripal, it looks like the British Intelligence Services and to some extent the other Western ones, which they work basically took that as a declaration of war.

There were a bunch of meetings on a very senior level, like they took that very seriously. This wasn't the latest sort of scandal. It was the use of chemical weapons on foreign soil. And that led to a ramped-up response.

And take a look at how decisive and clear the British response has been to the war. You can very well argue that Britain has been Ukraine's best ally in Europe after Poland and the Baltics arguably, it's sort of the same bunch of the countries that have stepped in 100% to support Ukraine from the beginning.

Anastasiia: Right, yes.

Jakub: Especially with lethal support, weapons, deliveries, all of that stuff.

Anastasiia: All other political stuff aside, kudos to Britain for doing that.

Jakub: Absolutely. But you also have to see that in a bit of context. Like there isn't some kind of historical treaty of friendship and alliance with Britain. It's not like Britain has been on the opposite side. They've been the opposed to Russia for quite a while now.

But one of the reasons why the UK was so quick to react and so clear to react is that they essentially have seen this as an undeclared war, already for quite a few years, potentially going back to Crimea, but certainly after the attacks on their soil.

Anastasiia: So, I really think this question and the answer to this question depends on what Mark meant by gangsters.

So, if we're talking about being dismissive or seeing them as some kind of crazy group of folks, then no, I think everyone only sees them as more dangerous because of this unpredictable nature of their operations.

And because of the fact that Russian spies and the Russian government to be frank, really just does not give a damn about any sort of international order and rules in any sphere, be it invading a country or killing somebody or poisoning them with chemical weapons.

[Music Playing]

Jakub: Yeah. But I don't think that anyone is dismissive and I don't think they should be.

Anastasiia: Right. I agree.

Jakub: This is a very dangerous bunch of people. And while we may laugh at their mishaps that doesn't mean that we should treat them lightly.

Thank you so much for listening to Power Lines. Next week we'll be speaking about the challenges people have been facing in bringing humanitarian aid to Ukraine, since the full-scale invasion.

Anastasiia: Power Lines was produced by Bea Duncan, Harry Stott and Talia Augustidis. The executive producer is Sandra Ferrari. The theme music is by Tom Biddle and Alfie Godfrey.

Season 1 Episode 9

Power Lines Episode 9 Transcript

Anastasiia: The Russian Intelligence Services have a certain mystique. A sinister and insidious aura. It’s always been this way.

Jakub: Litvinenko, Kim Philby, the Skripals, the spy rings of Silvermaster and Ware. You recognise all these names. You’ve heard about these missions. The shady dealings of the Russian Intelligence Services has launched a thousand novels, movies and thrillers. 

Anastasiia: As an organisation they are pretty much unparalleled in their reputation, and their jurisdiction is immense. They can requisition any Russian assets or infrastructure they like, and their doctrine allows them to use and target civilians at will.

Jakub: But now? Something has changed. Since the full scale invasion of Ukraine and the failure to install a puppet government, Russian intelligence’s star has faded. That aura shimmers less bright. 

Anastasiia: To open this week’s episode, Jakub and I want to tell you a few stories about the Russian Intelligence Services - to paint a picture of their rise under Putin, and his attempt to bring them back to a warped kind of Soviet glory. 

Jakub: But then also their fall in recent years, leading them to make one of the biggest blunders in intelligence history. 

Anastasiia: The language we use in times of war is really important. 

Archival in Ukrainian

Anastasiia: There’s a reason why you’ll hear Ukrainians unanimously describing the tanks rolling across Ukraine’s borders in February 2022 as the ‘full scale invasion’. It’s because this is not when Russian forces first entered Ukraine. That was in 2014, when Russia illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula. A move designed and directed by the hand of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, and the FSB, Russia’s civilian intelligence service and successor of the KGB. 

Jakub: The impact of the Maidan Revolution in 2014, was felt throughout Ukraine.

Archival: Slava Ukraini!

 I remember the fighting on the streets of Kyiv, the EU flags on Maidan, the feeling of pride in a people overcoming corrupt elites who had plagued the country for so many years.

But I also remember the reaction across the globe. Considered, optimistic support from the West, yes. But from the East, anger, and a rising tide of disinformation.

Anastasiia: For Russia, seeing a pro-western, pro-EU democracy taking its first steps in Ukraine, instead of the kind of puppet government that Yanukovich was increasingly embodying, was bad news. 

But the revolution also caused Russia to take steps to secure what it has for centuries seen as one of its major geographical weaknesses. Russia has no meaningful warm water port on its own coast. Hence, since 1997, its Navy leased a Black Sea port in Sevastopol, a strategically vital city on Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.

Putin, seeing that the revolution could jeopardise control of this, knew that Crimea had to be secured. So when the Maidan Revolution reached its zenith in February 2014, certain people started appearing on the peninsula.

Jakub: So-called “Little Green Men'' started popping up at key facilities and checkpoints, dressed in military fatigues and armed to the teeth, but without any state insignia. So who were they? They weren’t Ukrainian, that was for sure, their camo was foreign. Russians? Putin, of course, denied it. This was a masterstroke in FSB and GRU deception.

But quickly these Little Green Men had spread across the peninsula. In the chaos of the revolution on the mainland, this went relatively unopposed. The Ukrainian military in Crimea remained in their garrison. This allowed the foreign agents to use a not insignificant pro-Russian apathy in Crimea to forcibly seize key government buildings, and by March they had secured the entire peninsula.

Archival: Russian troops spreading out across the strategic Crimean Peninsula…

Anastasiia: Things were now moving quickly. The Crimean Supreme Council scheduled a referendum for March 16th to decide Crimea’s future. The choices were rigged before voting even began.

Archival: Groups of Pro-Russia troops, surrounding Ukrainian bases…

Anastasiia: Crimeans were given two options: join Russia or return to Crimea’s invalidated 1992 constitution, effectively becoming independent of Ukraine, and a vassal of Russia. This was a Russian kind of democracy - one enforced by jackboots and gun points. 

Archival: This morning, more unidentified, pro-Russia armed militias, controlling the streets of Crimea’s capital…

Anastasiia: You can guess how the results were reported. A turnout of 83 percent, with 96.7 percent voting to join Russia. No international observers were there to qualify this result.

Jakub: A leaked report from the Russian president’s Human Rights Council estimated turnout for the referendum was in reality just 30 percent, with roughly half of that voting to join Russia. On March 18th, Crimea’s annexation by Russia was officially signed. 

Anastasiia: So how had this happened? Was this an expert piece of opportunism by Russia in the wake of the chaos of Maidan? Sure. But the role of the intelligence services can’t be overlooked. The annexation was based on meticulous prior intelligence gathering, planning and a careful choreography of special operations forces and political messaging.

It showed that Putin had succeeded in his goal of taking the services back to their infamous Soviet capabilities.

Jakub: With the successes of Crimea fresh in mind, you might forgive the Russian Intelligence Services a bit of arrogance, a grotesque kind of swagger, even. 

This was not some small operation. This was not a botched attempt at driving tanks into Tbilisi or even giving a little air support to the blood soaked regime of Al-Assad in Syria. This was the illegal annexation of a strategically vital piece of land. It was a coup for Putin’s cherished FSB. Their actions over the ensuing years, however, were anything but.

Anastasiia: Following Crimea, the Russian intelligence services continued operations to destabilise foreign countries and pursue Russia’s frequently malign interests. You probably remember the failed assassination attempt of the ex-KGB agent Sergei Skripal in Sailsbury in the UK. 

Archival: It is now clear that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military grade nerve agent, of a kind developed by Russia…

The FSB had been caught red handed on foreign soil - a public humiliation.

Archival: The government has concluded that it is highly likely Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal…

Jakub: But there’s more - post-Crimea, the FSB appeared almost careless. There was the failed attempt at orchestrating a coup d’etat in Montenegro in 2016, attempts to add to destabilisation in Catalonia during the 2017 independence referendum. Poisonings in Czechia, explosions in Bulgaria.

The common thread among these actions? They all failed in their objectives. Following the highs of Crimea, it was failure, after failure.

Anastasiia: Which brings us up to 2022. 

Archival in Ukrainian

Anastasiia: Since the annexation of Crimea, and indeed before, the FSB had an eye trained solely on Ukraine. Spying on its political leaders, attempting to co-opt its institutions, working to bring down its pro-Western government.

Archival in Ukrainian

Jakub: In the months leading up to the war, the FSB unit responsible for Ukraine had swelled hugely in size. Their intel had led them to champion a lightning fast Blitzkrieg style attack on Kyiv, toppling the government and putting a puppet government in its place.

Expect flowers, flags and smiling people greeting you with open arms, the FSB told Putin and their military counterparts, the GRU. They would be welcomed as heroes and saviours, free from their decadent, soft, pro-Western leaders at last.

This… did not happen.

Anastasiia: So how did the FSB read this so wrong? Militarily, sure, Ukraine’s army would never have been able to hold out without Western support. But misreading the Ukrainian people’s steadfast and unwavering commitment to defending their country?

How the services reached this complete failure in intelligence is as extraordinary as it is baffling. And some put it down to an institutionalised fear of Putin. No one wants to displease the Tsar. 

Jakub: For example, a report commissioned by the FSB from a Kyiv-based marketing agency, delivered in February 2022, just weeks before the invasion, looked at the political attitudes of Ukrainians and their readiness for a change in government.

The report showed dissatisfaction with tough economic times, a fear of the increasing cost of living, apathy about the state of modern politics. The government didn’t favour particularly well either - Zelensky had a negative approval rating of minus 34. 

Anastasiia: But this is not unusual. You could read this sort of polling in any European country. And one thing is glaring in its omission. There was nothing in the reports that showed a particularly pro-Russian sentiment.

According to reporting by Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and expert on the security services, the findings of that report made it all the way up to the top of the Kremlin, to Putin himself. But they were twisted, warped in a way to match what Putin wanted to hear.

Jakub: In every step up the chain of command, these findings were altered by the FSB to fit the narrative of invasion. And this sentiment was equally clear in Putin's televised address before the invasion began

Archival in Russian

where he spoke at length about the failures of Ukrainian governance, even Nazism, mirroring the altered surveys produced for him by the FSB.

Archival in Russian

Anastasiia: This complete misreading of the situation on the ground in Ukraine meant the Russian military was met with a fightback it never expected. Or it had tricked itself into ignoring. 

Archival: The first time I held this thing it was two weeks ago, so it blast over the top of the tank…

Anastasiia: When tanks rolled into Ukraine in February 2022, the world gave Kyiv, Zelensky, the whole country, 72 hours. 72 hours before regime change, a Russian puppet government, and the end of Ukraine’s long journey from corruption to democracy.

The world, like the FSB, was wrong. 

Jakub: The Russian Intelligence Services rely on their image to convert and coerce. Exposing them as incompetent is a powerful blow. And since the full scale invasion, it has already led to a rise in defections and recruitment, as we’ll hear later in this episode.

Anastasiia: Do the Russian intelligence services still maintain that mystique, that aura? Does the agency which infiltrated MI6 and the US treasury, which carries out assassinations indiscriminately on foreign soil, which orchestrated the annexation of Crimea in 2014, still have the same level of perceived prestige? 

Jakub: After building up Russia’s intelligence services for decades, it is hubris and arrogance - fed by the spy in chief Putin - that may very well lead to their undoing.

–

Anastasiia: From Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent, you're listening to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World.

Jakub: In this series, we're going to be mapping the undercurrents and global consequences of the war in Ukraine, beginning in Kyiv and following the roads out wherever they may lead. I'm Jakub Parusinski.

Anastasiia: And I am Anastasiia Lapatina. This week we're going into one of the most mysterious and sinister organizations in the world, the Russian’s Intelligence Services and what their history and actions during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine can tell us about the way the Kremlin works.

So Jakub, you know how everyone perceives the Russian Intelligence Services to be this incredibly mysterious organization and these hundreds and thousands of spies around the world doing dirty work. I have like a weird story from Washington.

Jakub: Okay.

Anastasiia: Sounds really mysterious.

Jakub: Let's hear it. It does.

Anastasiia: I had a really kind of spooky time thinking about this when I was in Washington, in Washington DC. Roughly a month ago, I was just driving around with my friend and I remember we were passing down this one building and my friend goes, “Oh, this is where this scandal happened.” And it was about some Russian spy who was uncovered, who used to live there for like a decade or something.

And then on the same like drive, we were passing down a restaurant and he was like, “Oh, and this is where people joke that a bunch of Russian spies always go to like meet.” And this is kind of like common knowledge.

And I then went and talked to my friend who works at a think tank there and he also was like, “Oh yeah, that's the Russian spy café.” And I just like nearly got chills down my spine, because I was like, “Why is this like common knowledge stuff, that there are spies everywhere and everyone's just kind of okay with that?” It's really spooky.

Jakub: I've sort of experienced something similar in Brussels, a couple of times. They say that of the two places on the planet with the highest concentrations of spies, DC is probably number one. And then, Brussels is number two.

And I think it comes down to the fact that, look, this isn't some kind of James Bond movie. There's a whole lot of people that are working in this industry.

Anastasiia: Right.

Jakub: And then the second thing is a lot of the work is done well and what defines well for the intelligence community, at least I'm led to believe, is that it stays secret. But then a lot of it is also done poorly and it comes out and people hear about it all over the place.

Anastasiia: The more I like read into it and talk to people who’ve actually had these experiences, I realize that this is an actually really serious problem and a very real thing. And when Ukrainians would talk about something as basic as like banning visas for Russians or kind of tightening the grip on visas, so it's not that easy to get just a regular tourist visa for a Russian citizen, one of the arguments we use is that you guys have no idea the Europeans, who is actually going to be coming into your country. Many of these people very well could have been Russian spies.

Jakub: So, it's interesting that you bring that up. A couple of months ago I was in Georgia, it was a few weeks into this massive wave of Russian refugees sort of crossing into the country. And talking to some of the activists and the journalists on the ground, that's actually something that they mentioned quite consistently, is that-

Anastasiia: Interesting.

Jakub: Upon arrival to Georgia or on their way out, they were contacted by various organizations and asked to sort of work for them.

Anastasiia: That's crazy.

Jakub: Both on the Russian side and on the Georgian side. And people in the Westchester realize how big of an issue it is.

Before we dive into this deeper, would it make sense to just give a few terms and concepts out of what we’ll be discussing on this episode?

Anastasiia: Right. Do you want me to do it because I-

Jakub: Yeah, go ahead.

Anastasiia: Did a little chart.

Jakub: Sure.

Anastasiia: Okay. So, there is the KGB, which is the historical body, which basically no longer exists, but has existed for decades. And that was the main secret police is what they're called. But they were a very highly political body, which was tasked essentially with making sure that communist and socialist principles are in place and continue being in place.

Jakub: The Sword and the Shield, as they called themselves.

Anastasiia: Yes, exactly. So, it was this like highly bureaucratic structure. And when the Soviet Union fell apart, various of these directorates were either just completely disbanded or they became a whole separate organization.

So, after 1991, we have a few of the main bodies within the Russian Intelligence Services, starting with the FSB, which is something everyone has heard of. Basically, Russia's Federal Security Services.

They work mainly domestically, especially on counterintelligence. So basically, finding foreign spies within Russia. They also deal with counterterrorism, surveillance.

Jakub: So, they work domestically, but there's a big exception. While most counterintelligence agencies focus just on the country that they're from, for the FSB, this sort of near abroad, as they call it, meaning the former Soviet countries, are part of their domestic operations.

Anastasiia: It's kind of interesting because they basically take the word domestic as if it's still the Soviet Union. Like that is still domestic to them. So, they work in all of the Eastern Bloc countries essentially.

And then we also have the GRU or the GRU in English. It is basically Russia's military intelligence. So, they focus on foreign military intelligence and they have their own special services that do reconnaissance and sabotage for them.

There's also the SVR, which is Foreign Intelligence Services. And then there is FSO, those are Federal Protective Services. They're essentially bodyguards of politicians and state facilities.

But the main bodies that we’re focused on are FSB, the Federal Security Services and the GRU.

Okay Jakub, you spoke to someone pretty exciting this week, right?

[Music Playing]

Jakub: I did indeed. This week we were lucky enough to have a chat with Michael Weiss, the journalist and author, who is one of the leading voices in the West when it comes to looking at Russian espionage and the organizations which carry it out.

As well as being the director of special investigations for the Free Russia Foundation, Michael has written about Russia and the war in Ukraine for publications including The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs and The Daily Beast, where he is a contributing editor.

In 2015, he co-authored the bestselling book, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror and is currently working on a new book about the history of the GRU, something which we of course discussed at length in our conversation.

But as we've already outlined and you might have guessed, the Russian Intelligence Services are completely shrouded in mystery. So, first I wanted to know how on earth Michael goes about researching a subject like this, particularly their history during the Soviet years.

Michael, thanks so much for joining Power Lines. To kick things off, let's maybe go back to the origin, so to speak, of Russian Secret Services. You've been researching this topic quite a bit. How do you go about researching the topic?

Michael: The GRU is a very tricky subject because unlike the KGB after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which at least disclosed some of their archives and files and allowed Western and Russian scholars to come in and have a look, the GRU never did.

And the reason for that is simple, unlike the KGB, which was disbanded and then kind of reconstituted into different services, primarily the FSB and the SVR, the GRU continued uninterruptedly from the Soviet to the post-Soviet period.

So, it was founded in 1918, so it had its centenary just a few years ago. The trick with trying to figure out what they got up to, what the sort of organizational culture was, how it changed, how it evolved, what their relationship, which was characteristically a rival, one with first the OGPU, then the NKVD and then the KGB.

Getting all of this material, it's sort of a pastiche of scholarly books that have been written, memoirs chiefly by defectors, which are of varying degrees of reliability because defectors are notoriously not reliable or many of them are not.

So, this is the difficult thing, you take not on faith, anything that an actor in your historical psychodrama says, you have to dig into it, but unfortunately you can do only do so much digging. So, it's difficult. That's where you spend most of your time trying to separate the wheat from the chaff as it were.

Jakub: Yeah, lots of secrets, lots of lies. I imagine it's pretty tricky to wade through that, a lot of work.

Michael: They go hand in hand, don't they?

Jakub: So, we have all of these Russian security services, KGB, GRU. Again, for the listeners, KGB is let's say the political one. GRU is the military one.

Michael: I would say that KGB is the civilian one.

Jakub: The civilian one, yeah. Thank you. So, Russian Secret Services have almost this mythic character. Like in the popular imagination whereby they're capable. They're absolutely ruthless, have agents absolutely everywhere. To what extent is that something that was true? Were they really this grand secret service agencies?

Michael: So, I would make two points. The things that made the GRU and I would argue in the 1930s, the GRU was probably the most capable and successful intelligence agency on the planet. And they far eclipse the work of the NKVD to such a degree that some of the shining stars of the GRU were subsequently poached by the NKVD, which is the KGB's prior incarnation.

Two things that stood out. One, the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, which was very seductive, very attractive across countries, across classes, across races, particularly after the ravages of World War I, particularly after the stock market crash in 1929 and global depression. All of these things sort of conspired to make an entire generation radicalized.

But the other thing I would say is this, the Soviet Union, by definition was a cosmopolitan enterprise. I never used the word Russia in the book, when I'm referring to the USSR, for a reason; Soviet is more encompassing.

The protagonists in my story, at least up until the post-Soviet period, most of them are not Russian. I have Germans, I have Austrians, I have Poles who grew up in Galicia, in what is now Western Ukraine. I've got Americans, I've got Canadians. It is a kind of United Colours of Benetton, kind of phenomenon.

And one of the things that makes this a virtue for espionage is the sons and daughters of Europe and North America, whether or not they go to Moscow and get properly trained or they're simply recruited in place, they blend in, they speak the languages, they are to the manor born. They don't look alien, they don't look foreign, they don't raise suspicions. They had this kind of global, international background.

And some of them were very famous writers and journalists. We forget Kim Philby, his first real assignment by the KGB, with NKVD was in fratricidal Spain. And what was his role? He was the correspondent, war correspondent for The Times of London. Posing as a fascist sympathizer embedded within Franco's retinue. And this made Kim Philby, well, several things.

One, nobody assumed he was a communist because his by-lines were all fascist propaganda. And two, made him a subject matter expert on the Iberian Peninsula, which is basically his start in MI6.

So, one of the deep penetration moles, that the Soviets ever ran, one of the most successful spies they ever had was a journalist, who everybody knew his name and was reading his work. It doesn't get more provocative than that, does it?

Jakub: One of the most interesting things about the intelligence services in the late Soviet period, and particularly their demise, is that the current Russian President, Vladimir Putin, was there to witness it. So, what was Putin's role in the KGB?

Anastasiia: So, I think it's pretty common knowledge that Putin worked there, but I think people don't realize for how long, because he was there for 16 years. And working there was — I don't know if it was his first job, but I counted he was 23 when he joined. And he spent 16 years there from 1925 to 1991.

And then everybody also knows that he was interested in East Germany for five years, but he basically didn't do anything especially exciting. He did a lot of recruiting. He was really good at communications. He built a lot of networks.

I think the fact that he worked there for so long definitely must have had an impact on how he approached his career in politics, because he finished his time at the KGB and went straight into politics after that, right?

Jakub: Yeah. So, for all the mystique of the KGB, every time I listen to these stories about Putin's job back then, and I think he was not exceptional in any-

Anastasiia: No, not at all. He was just an operative.

Jakub: The thing is, it sounds actually incredibly boring, like very sort of government administrative. It's almost like a mixture of the HR and the accounting departments without wanting to hate on either of them. So, it sort of feels like a very kind of mundane job.

Anastasiia: Yeah.

Jakub: So, one thing that Michael pointed out and it seems to be consistent across the Russian Intelligence community, is that they're always at a state of war.

Anastasiia: Right.

Jakub: They're always sort of thinking about how they can undermine, threaten, damage their adversaries. It doesn't really feel like something that comes across from a lot of the Western agencies, but-

Anastasiia: Yeah. Because one of their institutional assumptions is that war is eternal. They basically forever live in this atmosphere of this other huge grand enemy. Like this isn't just, I think a Cold War thing. This has always been there and this is how they operate to this day.

It is definitely a very secretive, but a very, very active, unpredictable to outsider's organization. And I think in a way, we could see that with how Putin functions in his foreign policy. Because he's definitely not somebody who just passively sits out and hopes for international peace around him. He actively seeks out conflict and actively seeks armed engagement and wars.

Jakub: The other thing is that his experience in Germany seems to have led him to believe that there is a weak response or sort of a momentary lapse in sort of this aggression, in this offense, is essentially something that is a deadly threat to the survival of the regime.

He saw the East German state crumble. There's sort of this famous and I'm pretty sure slightly apocryphal story that essentially when the Soviet regime was crumbling or sort of the East German regime was crumbling, they called Moscow and no one answered. There is this sort of mystique that because he saw that-

Anastasiia: Another mystery.

Jakub: Yeah. Essentially, he witnessed a moment of weakness, a moment of failure and that led him to believe that no, the only sort of policy that you can have that is going to be ultimately successful is one of a perpetual hard line.

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: What do we have next?

Jakub: I wanted to hear Michael's thoughts about modern Russia, the collapse of the Soviet services and why Putin was so determined to build them back to their former glory.

You have this world class agency in the interbellum throughout the war. And then the Soviet Union changes, right?

Michael: Yeah.

Jakub: It loses it’s let's say intellectual flair, diversity and so forth, becomes more brutish. So, before we jump to Ukraine in the present day, like to what extent is that something that Putin himself has been driving as a former intelligence officer?

I understand he was KGB, not GRU. By all accounts, wasn't that prominent within the KGB?

Michael: No.

Jakub: Would you see this as being a coherent campaign to rebuild and I would say almost resupply the security services, the intelligence services?

Michael: So, there's a period where I have to be honest and this is either my fault as a scholar or just them’s the breaks when you're dealing with the spy agency that doesn't want to talk about its own internal history, at least not with an outsider.

The immediate post-Soviet period is almost a black hole to really get an understanding for what's going on. I actually, in my book, in one of the early chapters, which talks about special tasks (which is another kind of Soviet euphemism for assassination, sabotage, terrorism),I locate the year 2007 as kind of a fulcrum point in the reconstitution and also repurposing the special services under Putin.

What happened in 2007? Several things. One, most famously, most notoriously, the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in London using a weapon of mass destruction, a radioactive isotope, polonium-210. Very chilling, goes beyond even the darkest periods of the Cold War.

Two, there was a situation in Iraq, as the U.S. was occupying Iraq at the time, several Russian diplomats were taken hostage by insurgents and demanded, they gave like a 48, 72 hours, “Russia must pull all of its forces out of the Republic of Chechnya or we're going to behead these hostages or these diplomats on camera.”

Well, of course, Putin did not give into terroristic demands. And all of the guys were killed. Some beheaded, I think some shot. He went nuts, Putin, and demanded that the Duma grant him authority, which of course it did, because it was still just a rubber stamp parliamentary body at that point, grant him the authority to conduct extra judicial assassinations, not just in Russia, but overseas.

So officially, the gloves have now come off and the services special forces operators, Spetsnaz, but primarily intelligence operatives, can now do mokroye delo; wet work. Kill people abroad. And this is written into Russian law.

This is kind of a very symbolic, metaphoric thing, isn't it? It shows that all of a sudden, the services are back and they're now back with the same kind of core foundational remit that they had once had, which was to again, ensure the sanctity of the regime and the state and make sure that no enemies either within or without, can tear it down ever again.

But also, to become more aggressive and to do the sort of things that the old KGB had got up to in the Soviet period.

And then, lo and behold, in 2009, a GRU special task unit called 29155, which is very famous now (even if you've never heard that numerical sequence), is born. And this special task unit is devoted to assassination and other forms of state terrorism.

Look at what they've got up to in the last 10 plus years. Christo Grozev, who's a subject in my book, given his work, unmasking members of 29155 and identifying the culprits responsible for trying to kill Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, Emilian Gebrev and his son and factory manager and Sophia, and now blowing up depots in Czechia and Bulgaria as well.

He told me something very terrifying, which is he can only locate for the last 10 years or so, only about 15% of the operations known that have been prosecuted by unit 29155.

So, 85% of what this unit, which consists of, I don't know, maybe over a hundred members, maybe fewer now, because they've all been rolled up, 85% of what they've done we don't know about.

So, this has to be borne in mind when we talk about, well, the GRU is this kind of ridiculous keystone cops-like organization that fails because they keep getting caught red-handed. Well, they do get caught, but again, we don't know what their successes are because by definition, a success in intelligence work is secret. Nobody knows about it.

Jakub: They only know your failures.

Anastasiia: They only know your failures. Exactly. So, I would argue that that time period is when Putin felt confident enough in his kind of restoration internally of some of the grandeur and the stability of the Russian Federation, particularly after the tragic comic Yeltsin, late Yeltsin period, that he could now begin to reconstitute the former Soviet Union's ability to project power abroad.

And that indeed is what I would say the last 10, 15 years of Russian foreign policies look like. Whether it's the 2008 invasion of Georgia, which by the way was an idea for the GRU and they were deeply criticized for their failure to perform more militarily, capably, I suppose, in rolling tanks right up to the doorstep of [inaudible 00:23:12], to the intervention in Syria, to indeed the takeover of Crimea in 2014.

If Georgia was the low point for the GRU as a service, Crimea was its high point. That is why I think they have been given such a wide birth, certainly in recent years. That was an almost flawless operation from their perspective.

[Music Playing]

Anastasiia: I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere that the FSB and the GRU, one of them is the body that gives Putin his first daily briefings. So, they're the people that not just broadly influence the policy in the Kremlin, but they're the ones who are being listened to first and the most in some way.

It's pretty crazy though, how powerful they are. Everyone constantly talks about their internal competitions. How the FSB and the GRU are competing to be Putin's favourites and how important they are to the Kremlin's policymaking.

Jakub: Yeah. Well, in every country, the intelligence services provide briefings to the leadership. I think the difference in Russia is just the level of influence and decision making that they have.

So, you have people, for example, like Nikolai Patrushev, who is former Director of the FSB. And is widely believed to be one of the sort of leading figures in Putin's inner circle.

Anastasiia: Right.

Jakub: So, you have this really outsized role. It's not just that the services are so influential, it's also that they are a core part. They're the pet project, they are the vehicle through which Putin has been building modern Russia.

When he's been building his empire, it's been through agencies like the FSB, like the GRU and all of their various programs and projects about whether it's cyber warfare, recruiting all over the … like they have been the instruments of the empire.

Anastasiia: A part of this must be personal. Again, having spent almost two decades there, the amount of connections he has within these services, many people who are high up there are genuinely his friends. And he spent his youth working on the idea that he is this great patriot that's working for the betterment of his country.

So, the core of all of these services must have been his biggest driver when he was young. His biggest motivation. And I've read in interviews that he spoke very highly of that time and he really said that it wasn't some decision to just like, go and make a buck. It was highly ideological, kind of, “I'm a patriot, I have to do this right thing and serve my country.”

Jakub: Absolutely. It was his youth. People always think fondly about the time of his youth. He spent two decades building them up. These are really his people.

Which then raises the question of, if this has been such a fundamental part of the project, how is it possible that things have gone so terribly, terribly wrong? Especially I think with the FSB, which as a successor of the KGB would, is probably where Putin has spent more of his time.

[Music Playing]

So, let's fast forward until today, we have now nine months, 10 months almost of a three-day operation. The failure to take all of Ukraine and it seems like there's a host of reasons for this, but one is clearly a failure of intelligence.

Michael: Correct.

Jakub: It was poorly planned, poorly researched. Who's responsible? Let's maybe start with that one.

Michael: Well, I would even go further than what you just said. The very conception of a war in Ukraine, particularly after eight years of war in Ukraine, which has turned the majority, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians into Patriots on the one hand, but on the other hand, deeply hostile to Russia and to Russian influence in their country. The very concede of this was just a colossal disaster and a failure of imagination and a failure of everything.

Now look, if you're asking who's to blame, well I think there's plenty of blame to go around. I alluded earlier to the FSB’s fifth service, which under Putin, because the FSB is one of his kind of legacy, it came from the KGB and that's kind of his tribe, as it were. He decided he wanted to create a foreign intelligence arm for the domestic security service.

So, the FSB fifth service was tasked, if you listen to Andrei Soldatov and his partner Irina Borogan, with gathering all the intelligence on Ukraine, running or cultivating fifth columnists, agents, deep penetration agents who at the outbreak of war would serve the occupying regime instead of their own country.

And also, just getting a lay of the land, how are Ukrainians disposed to Russia? Will they cheer and throw flowers and chocolates at tanks, Russian tanks that roll down Kreshchatyk and Kyiv and all this stuff. They didn't get it right.

And there is now a supposition that the GRU has been tasked with sort of picking up the pieces of this campaign. And that's interesting for several reasons. The commander of Russian forces, Surovikin, what's his name? General Armageddon, he was running the intervention in Syria, which was also by Russian lights, very successful, even though it was very limited operation, mostly air power, with the GRU however, essentially in the cockpit as it were.

So, the GRU has had a pretty good few years and now I think the problem for them is they have to inherit this disastrous war and somehow-

Jakub: Salvage it.

Michael: Save face or somehow salvage it. Exactly. And again, there's more that we don't know than what we do. And my focus in Ukraine, funnily enough … and this is sort of one of the cheats or one of the workarounds for not being able to, as I said earlier, go to Moscow, knock on the door of the aquarium and say, “Can I see your library and can I meet some of your top spies? Because I'm writing a book on you guys.”

What I have to do is rely on counterintelligence agencies and counterintelligence sources in the West, particularly in NATO, but also in Ukraine, who are essentially the adversaries of the GRU.

So, I have several chapters on Ukraine, but the first is about GUR, Ukraine's Military Intelligence Service. And they were already known by the way, before February 24th of this year as one of the premier and most talented military intelligence services in Europe. That comes from the CIA. So, very high marks for GUR.

But one of the things that they managed to do quite effectively from 2014 until now is hoover up GRU agents and operatives in mainland Ukraine, outside of Crimea, another country that is superb, but this is Estonia.

So, a few months ago I get a call on Signal from the former press officer of KaPo, which is the Estonian Internal Security Service or their FBI, and he said, “How soon can you be in Tallinn?” And I said, “Oh, interesting. Why?” He's like, “Well, I can't tell you, but let's just say it'll be good for you and good for your book.” Well, that's telling me, without telling me that they've got a crack in GRU story.

When I get to Tallinn, I went into the headquarters of KaPo and I met with Alexander Toots, who's the head of CI, and I said, “Why am I here?” He said, “Well, you'll never guess. But the first GRU agent that we ever caught and unmasked and tried and convicted and then traded back to Russia in 2018, Artem Zinchenko, he's just defected to us from Russia.

I said, “What do you mean he's defected to you?” He's like, “He came back to us, he asked, he wanted to get out of Russia, and we helped him, and we knew him because we arrested him.”

And I said, “Why did he do this?” He said, “Because of the war in Ukraine, he has family in Ukraine fighting on the government side. He thinks Putin is a tyrant on par with Stalin and he's here and you'll meet him in an hour.”

So, spent four hours with this guy and the Russian government didn't even know that he had just defected to a NATO territory.

Jakub: Wow.

Michael: So anyway, you see kind of the epiphenomenon or phenomena of this war has now affected and I would say degraded all levels of the Russian security and military establishment.

And I was led to believe that there have been a lot of defections from the Russian services since February. And if not defections in terms of crossing the border and fleeing, which obviously the regime in Moscow will know about at some point, perhaps becoming double agents or defectors in place.

[Music Playing]

Jakub: For all the failures of the invasion, of the initial plans of the invasion and the heroism of the Ukrainian resistance, counter attack, et cetera, in the beginning, there was actually quite a few people who betrayed Ukraine, Russian agents, saboteurs, defectors from Ukraine to Russia, in the initial phase of the war. There's quite a few of them, no?

Anastasiia: Yeah. And we can talk about this in the context of like human intelligence and spies, but there's also some level of corruption, just broad corruption-

Jakub: Sure.

Anastasiia: Within the industries. Like just a few weeks ago, I think there was another Ukrainian factory that supposedly was making parts that were sold to Russia, that then were used to manufacture Russian weapons. Like that's really bad.

It's really interesting because every other week or even every other day these days, you see this piece of news about somebody uncovering a Russian spy or a Russian agent or a Russian sympathizer. And you see all of these photos usually with books. It's usually like, “Oh, this person has a Bust of Lenin in their apartment and look at the red Soviet flag and like all of these Russian media pamphlets,” or whatever.

So, like you could clearly see that these are highly ideologically motivated people who … I'm sure a lot of these spies are doing these things with money, but also many of them seem to genuinely be interested in whatever Russia is saying.

Jakub: But when I think about sort of how the FSB and the GRU have been preparing the invasion or just operating in general, this has been years and decades of cultivating relationships and building up all of these characters all across the country.

And I think it's not crazy to say that they had really broad networks of people across Ukraine, that they were hoping would do their bidding. And many did.

Anastasiia: Take just Telegram channels. Remember we had these waves of basically censorship and banning of Telegram channels that our intelligence services uncovered to have been manipulated and set up and managed by Russian Intelligence Services.

Like Russian FSB operatives, literally setting up like news Telegram channels in Ukrainian or in Russian within Ukraine to influence information that was flowing around and just spread Russian propaganda. This was a huge effort.

I remember digging into it, this was like hundreds of people like straight up on FSB pay checks within Russia or within Ukraine spreading all of this false information, all of this dis-info.

Jakub: Yeah. And you get the same thing in the West.

Anastasiia: Definitely.

Jakub: For decades, the Soviet agencies would sort of leverage anti-war movements, anti-nuclear movements. If you've sort of been approached, if you feel like for whatever reason Russia plays an important role in countering the U.S. or whatever. There's a lot of people who have their own reasons, for that.

How likely are you going to go along with it after all of the sort of disasters of this year. All of the people who have been uncovered, all of the incompetences that you've seen, like basically just this long list of failures.

You look at this sort of cartoonishly weak organization and you think like, “Really, do I want to risk working with them? Like are these people going to be competent enough to entrust my career, my safety, my life perhaps?” I think a lot of people say, “Maybe not. Maybe I'm not quite ready.”

Anastasiia: Yeah, I think definitely this war has completely ruined Russia's reputation around the world and in specific circles. And there will always be people who do not fall for this and who really keep on being completely persuaded in a huge NATO, U.S, whatever led enemy.

Jakub: By the way, like, if it completely fails, like I think the narrative is going to be betrayal of the top. Like this is what you already see on the Vagner Telegram channels and in their videos is that they believe that like the people in charge are essentially betraying the ideals.

Anastasiia: Isn't it crazy just how much history repeats itself?

[Music Playing]

Jakub: First as a first, then as a tragedy and then just endless sequels.

Specifically, this failure of the FSB early on in the war, sort of in the run up to the war. I remember I spent quite a few years in Kyiv and there was always this kind of … it was almost like a cliché that Russia would send diplomats agents very highly trained, very highly skilled, speaking local languages, learning everything about the country that they go to, but to Ukraine, they would never speak Ukrainian. They never made the effort. There was always sort of this incredible blind spot.

And then I think the Washington Post had this story and there were some documents that were circulating about the FSB sort of commissioning, essentially sociological research that said, don't invade because nobody really supports you.

As that report was carried up the hierarchy of the FSB and towards Putin, every time the title of it would change to, well maybe you can invade and then actually you probably should, to Ukrainians are pining for Russian liberators, right?

Michael: Exactly. You never want to displease the tsar.

Jakub: So, you think that's credible. That's a credible interpretation of what happened?

Michael: Absolutely, absolutely.

Jakub: That's crazy.

Michael: And then, you can evenly distribute culpability in Russia. What is the old line? The Kremlin has many towers. Look Putin, we obviously don't know what's going on behind closed doors and who he's yelling at, to put it mildly.

But let us recall that extraordinary dressing down of Naryshkin at the start of the war, the SVR director, speak plainly, remember that brusque bark that Putin had to his own head of foreign intelligence.

One could in hindsight look at that and say, well, maybe the sort of … and the SVR is considered to be the gentleman spy service. These are the more educated and refined and sophisticated and nuanced intelligence officers of Russia. Maybe the SVR was saying, “This ain’t going to go the way you think.”

Whereas the FSB and perhaps even the GRU were saying, “Oh no, don't worry about it, be a cakewalk.” Again, tanks rolling down Kreshchatyk in 72 hours in all of this.

Ukraine is going to be studied for generations to come. Ukraine, in a way, and this may upset some of your listeners, it doesn't need to join NATO anymore. It has getting a NATO standardized military, it has done single-handedly where it counts, the heavy lifting that which NATO was founded to do collectively, which is defeat the Russian or Soviet military.

And at the intelligence level from captured kit to interrogations of POWs to just studying granular detail at close proximity, the Russian way of war, to what the Ukrainians, what the SBU is doing with these interceptions to recruiting guerrilla warfare actors inside Russia who may or may not be ethnic Russians themselves. All of these things are going to be — it is a bonanza for NATO.

Jakub: Absolutely.

Michael: It's a bonanza for the West. And so, even if you don't have a humanitarian imperative to help Ukraine win the war, if you're just a cynical bastard and you just care about utilitarianism, this war so far and Ukraine's victory in it is a gift. It is going to be an object lesson for, as I say, generations to come.

And honestly, it's also debunked so many myths that we have either received or seamlessly integrated into our own discourse and understanding of Russia and its role in the world, the 10-foot-tall giant that can destroy the globe.

All of these things that for years some of us have been arguing against, have been demolished within the space of not even nine months.

Jakub: Yeah. And I imagine, just to close off on the intelligence service part, you were talking at the beginning about sort of the international appealing, cosmopolitan, intellectual kind of nature of Soviet Intelligence Services in the 1930s, last decade or two at least, there was this powerful actor. I imagine that now recruiting people around the world is just-

Michael: They're going to have a hard time.

Jakub: Yeah.

Michael: They're going to have a hard time. The global south notwithstanding, which is a whole other topic of discussion. But in Europe it's going to be tricky.

There are always going to be people who will offer themselves up to an enemy nation, whether it's for money or resentment and recrimination. All these people are always going to be with us, unfortunately.

But the ideological zeal or the kind of idealism that drives a lot of people to go over to the other side, sure you have far left anti-imperialist tankies. You have fascists who still like Putin and defend him, but it's not in the zeitgeist anymore.

And this is not to downplay or diminish the threat posed by Russia. I didn't agree with the Obama administration's characterization of Russia as this kind of transactional power and a regional nuisance. We've seen they're not just a regional nuisance.

So, I'm not trying to say that Russia is this kind of like spent force in the world. It's not. But will they ever get what they used to have? No. And that politics of nostalgia, as Timothy Snyder puts it, that that longing to have this restored grand juror that they are a great power in the making.

And I think another historian, Ronald Hingley puts it well, he says, the sort of the Russian mindset is an inferiority complex wrapped in a superiority complex. They think of themselves as the greatest nation on earth and the greatest people on earth, but they resent the fact that nobody agrees with them.

[Music Playing]

Jakub: That's a really good characterization. Thank you so much, Michael.

Michael: Anytime. Thanks for having me.

Anastasiia: In two weeks in Power Lines, we're going to be looking into the work that is done by NGOs, who have been bringing aid and advocating for the people of Ukraine. And asking the question of why the major NGOs have found it so difficult to do so and what they can learn from smaller, more effective ones.

Jakub: If you want to support us further, you can subscribe to our ad free feed on Apple and by looking at Power Lines + on Spotify. You can also support the Kyiv Independent by finding us on our Patreon, to get behind the scenes content. Go to patreon.com/kyivindependent, to continue helping us report on the most important stories in Ukraine.

Anastasiia: Look up Message Heard wherever you're listening to this podcast for more of our original shows. And find us on our website at messageheard.com or on our Power Lines Twitter, @PowerLinesPod, as well as Instagram and Facebook by looking up at Message Heard.

Jakub: You can also follow the Kyiv Independent on Twitter and Facebook at Kyiv Independent and Instagram at kyivindependent_official to get the latest news and stay up to date with our coverage. Please also subscribe and rate Power Lines in your podcast app, as it really helps others find our show.

Anastasiia: Power Lines is a partnership between the Kyiv Independent and Message Heard. It was produced by Bea Duncan, Harry Stott and Talia Augustidis. The executive producer is Sandra Ferrari. The theme music is by Tom Biddle and Alfie Godfrey.

Bonus Episode 8

Power Lines Episode 8 Bonus Transcript

[Music playing]

Anastasiia: Hello listeners, welcome to our bonus episode of Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World. I am Anastasiia Lapatina.

Jakub: And I'm Jakub Parusinski. This week we're speaking about cyber warfare with Lauren Zabierek, the Executive Director of the Cyber Project at Harvard Kennedy School, Belfer Center.

Anastasiia: So Jakub, you spoke to the journalist Andy Greenberg about cyber warfare for our last week's main episode, but what did you want to know from Lauren?

Jakub: Well, Andy Greenberg has an amazing sort of ability to recount the different cases of cyber warfare.

I think Lauren is looking at the question more from a policy or an institutional perspective, looking at how governments, institutions, companies should look at cyber war and that cybersecurity, more from a sort of governance perspective as well.

Anastasiia: This is actually really interesting because since cyber warfare is such a new method of warfare, I'm not sure if states have caught on up to instituting actual policies and understanding what to actually do with it and how to govern it.

Jakub: Well, that's actually the big challenge. Whereas most countries will have doctrines and even established ways to respond to various hostile acts, cyber warfare is just a little bit in an unregulated space, a bit like crypto or NFTs. It's something that we haven't really caught up with.

[Music playing]

Anastasiia: Great. So, let's hear from Lauren then.

Jakub: So Lauren, thank you so much for joining Power Lines. Maybe just to sort of start off, what do people mean when they talk about cyber warfare?

Lauren: Yeah, that's a great question and there's sort of a difference here, between the concept of cyber warfare and an act of war in cyberspace. And this is something that I think can be very confusing to a lot of people because we just see the news and we see actions in cyberspace and we hear the word cyber-attack and that sounds very violent.

But the differences here, cyber warfare itself, I think really refers to the certain tactics, techniques and procedures and actions taken in cyberspace to attack and harm computers and networks by one actor against another.

Cyber war or an act of cyber war or an act of war in cyberspace is much different. That's actually a very political determination. So, when we talk about war, there's implications there. It's loaded obviously, and the victim nation is really the one that has to make that determination.

There are thousands of cyber-attacks every day by nation states, by criminals with different intent and different results. But generally, it's thought that an active war in cyberspace is going to result in massive loss of life, massive economic damage, massive injury or harm.

So, there are a couple different sort of distinctions here that hopefully we can make clear to the audience.

Jakub: Let's move back a little bit towards the, let's say, early part of the 21st century. Where does this kind of idea of using cyberspace as a battlefield come from? What's sort of the story of getting to the present day?

Lauren: I would say starting in the 2010s, the use of cyber and sort of different viruses and malwares propagating that of course, was happening well before that, even once the internet was developed.

But I would say, probably the 2010s is when this started to get real attention from policymakers, policymakers and decision makers starting to think this could actually have some real implications as we become more and more and more connected.

And I think we also saw some of the most disruptive, I guess you can say, and even in some cases, again, destructive attacks. So, looking again back to 2015/2016 with the attacks on the energy grid.

And then of course now we're sort of in the midst of the ransomware epidemic as they call it. So, a lot of really sophisticated capabilities are in use by criminals, by cyber criminals. Obviously, last year we had the attack on colonial pipelines, so part of our critical infrastructure, there was also a ransomware attack on an entire government, Costa Rica.

So, we're seeing a lot of sort of blending of capabilities and tactics by different actors. So, this sort of ramping up, I guess, of capabilities and actions over the last decade and a half (we'll see), is I think when it's become the most serious.

Jakub: You mentioned ransomware, so this is presumably by various criminal groups trying to essentially hold a piece of digital infrastructure or sort of take it hostage basically, until they're paid.

What's sort of the other types of attacks and how are they used? Just to give the audience a little bit of a sense of what we're talking about.

Lauren: So, you mentioned ransomware, that is typically used by cyber criminals to extort money from unwitting victims, basically. And it works a lot of times because the economics of cyber-crime are such that it does favour the criminals.

And then of course there are the nation state actors. So, a lot of times we see this as cyber espionage, so spying and gathering information.

Other times it's sabotage. Part of the appeal to it is that you can use it to your particular will and then it offers some plausible deniability as well as some reach. Although more and more, I think that deniability is going away.

Jakub: Talking about the actors involved here, obviously whether it's in the movies or in real life, it seems like the Russians play a very big role in this space.

But we've also seen that Russia does have limited capabilities. It's certainly sourcing a lot of drones from Iran. The Sony hack is believed to be connected to North Korea. Who's the big players here?

Lauren: We always say sort of the big four. The big four adversaries in cyber, and Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.

Jakub: Is there any sort of specialisation or differences in style or do they have some kind of specific areas that they focus on?

Lauren: Well, I think if we look to Russia, they were the ones that we have seen more destructive malware.

In times past, we've really looked at China as saying using cyber operations to perform more intellectual property theft and of course theft of other data.

And then of course with North Korea really sanctions evasion. And trying to mine for cryptocurrencies.

Jakub: A little bit less glamorous than the others.

Lauren: Yeah.

Jakub: So, moving back towards Ukraine, we see in the sort of run up to the full-scale invasion, basically after 2013, there's the revolution, Ukraine changes course geopolitically and we see quite a bit of these various types of cyber-attacks showing up.

As you mentioned, there's the attacks on the power grid. I remember being in Ukraine quite a bit during those years. It seemed like that was quite a lot of activity, testing the state capabilities. Would you say that Ukraine was one of the major battlefields for cyber warfare throughout the 2010s?

Lauren: There's a lot of people who will say that, yeah, Ukraine was sort of this test bed for Russia. And I think with what has happened with their invasion of Ukraine that maybe it wasn't necessarily a test bed. It wasn't like, “Oh we're just going to test out our capabilities on Ukraine.” It was actually for something much more sinister.

And so, yes, certainly honing capabilities and testing out the ability to achieve certain effects in cyberspace? Yes, absolutely. But also, with I think a more strategic goal, trying to break down people's will.

So yeah, I think it has been a key tool for them to use in the lead up to this particular invasion. It probably will remain a tool, although I think there have been a lot of people who have questioned like, “Oh, why didn't we see all these huge destructive cyber-attacks that we expected?” And did they have the intended effect? And are they as good as they thought?

But I think one of the biggest things that we've learned is that cyber really remains a tool in the sort of the whole toolkit and not the sole domain by which you win a war.

Jakub: So, building off on that, because I think this is a very interesting point about cyber being a tool, and there's a question of how effective it is. So, as you mentioned throughout the 2010s, there's a bunch of attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. There's lots of blackouts or attempts to sort of take down the power grid, various smaller attacks as well.

And then the war starts, nine months ago. Have you been surprised by the significance of cyber warfare as a tool, as part of the war? Is it more or less what you've expected? Like is it underwhelming, overwhelming, feels like after a lot of fear generated around this, it isn't quite as big. Obviously when you have missiles reigning down, it's a much more clear and present danger.

Lauren: Well, I think that's a great point is that that's a key lesson that I think the community has come to observe. In a war, cyber is sort of a compliment, especially if you can do it with very tight coordination across all of your domains of war.

But really there's no (and this sounds so glib of course), substitute for kinetic operations in a war to destroy and have real impact and prosecute the goals of the war.

So, to your question, am I surprised? I don't know if I'm necessarily surprised or not. I think because we are in this new domain, we're witnessing something for really the first time. I don't think it lessens the fact that yes, cyber operations can still be dangerous and still be impactful.

Let's still look back at those particular attacks, not only from Russia, but other nations as well. They can still have real harm against civilian populations. Like people can still be harmed, whether that's from a sort of first degree or second or third order effects. And that I think is again, something that's sort of lost in the debate here.

Jakub: Moving forward a little bit to what we have learned from the war. And it's now been sort of nine months, we've seen sort of cyber-attacks play a big role, perhaps smaller than expected, or at least not as significant as kinetic ones as you mentioned. What are the big lessons that Western powers, let's say, can take from the war?

Lauren: So, I think the biggest lesson, and I'm going to quote here from James Andrew Lewis, from the CSIS, he wrote in a recent paper, “A well-prepared and energetic defense can prevail over offense in cyberspace.”

I think that is huge because the way that Ukraine acted to defend against all these attacks, one of the ministers recently said like, “Look, these attacks are happening, but Ukraine is defending against them. So, we're not necessarily seeing a lot of those impacts in cyberspace.”

I think that has huge implications for other nations. If we can be well prepared and if we can have that sort of energetic defence, that would really change the game.

But for many nations, I don't think we're necessarily prepared at this point to be like that. Ukraine has had years to sort of understand what is happening to them and be prepared.

The work that was done to make data resilient, to pull together the people needed to defend against these attacks and these relationships that were built, not only across with other nations but companies as well. There was a plan, I think that strategic plan came out in 2016 for a way to defend against these particular attacks. So, I think that's one big lesson.

Another thing is there have been a lot of people sort of like, “Well, does this mean Russia doesn't have such capabilities?” No, I don't think that at all. What I do think though is that the training and the sort of use of cyber in a joint construct is really, really crucial to I think have the impacts that planners and operators are seeking. I think that's one of the biggest lessons that we've learned as well.

Jakub: So, looking at sort of the reaction of governments, but I think also turning to the Belfer Center's cyber project, you have the stated aim of deterring non-state actors and terrorist adversaries from conducting attacks in cyberspace. What are the instruments that you can use to deter bad actors? What are the tools that are available?

Lauren: Well, when you're talking about preventing attacks against yourself, there are a couple of things that any person can do. Things like having strong random passwords across your accounts, using multifactor authentication.

But in terms of deterrence, I think for a long time we've really thought about cyber defence, national security and deterrence as kind of more like a military construct or a military function. But I think it's really become clear in the last couple of years, we'll say five years, seven years, et cetera, that it is not just a department of defence or a military function.

It's really on all of us and not just on individuals, but it's also like our domestic structures. It's our states, it's our local governments, it's our federal government. I think one of the biggest aspects of deterrence now especially, is going back to what James Andrew Lewis said, “A well-prepared and energetic defence.”

And then on the other side of it too, is this concept of resilience. And if we sort of accept that, yes, we are experiencing thousands of cyber-attacks a day, but if we can sort of shake those off and not let those impacts really affect us and damage, not only our systems, but our wellbeing, our psyche as well, then we can become more resilient, if we have plans in place to recover from those attacks.

And then also too, you mentioned work at the Belfer Center. While I've been here, I have focused on kind of the whole spectrum of security from international all the way down to how we sort of organize ourselves for defence.

So, I've written a couple of things that look at how we can be better positioned, better postured for that collective defence, how we can sort of come together and share information and basically collaborate. That again, goes towards better defence.

Jakub: So, this might be a painful oversimplification, but do you feel like the war has been a net positive or net negative for cybersecurity of, let's say, Western democracies?

On the one hand, we've had this increased attention, I think there's an increased level of knowledge. Perhaps Russia has shown its hand and its capabilities to a detrimental level for itself or has the sort of the progress because war drives innovation. Have we sort of lost more on that side?

Lauren: Well, to your initial point, I think war is always a net negative.

Jakub: Of course.

Lauren: And I know you're saying, okay, but for cybersecurity (I see what you're saying, I just wanted to make that point), it's been truly horrifying. But in terms of the things that we have witnessed, it's been instructive, basically.

And I think it's sort of ushered in a new reality and a new understanding and a new way of doing things. I think this is probably the first time where we saw conflict where private companies were huge players and it obviously not belligerence, but came to the very quick and decisive aid to Ukraine. Like Microsoft or other tech companies that have helped out and provided information. I think that's been something that we haven't necessarily seen before.

It's shone light on our supply chain security issues. I think given the public sort of a front seat view to understand more of the capabilities and sort of more of the risk. So, in terms of that, I think it's sort of quickly ushered along this sort of new realities for people.

And then taking those lessons learned, I think a lot of people are trying to do that. And then they're sort of pivoting to, “Okay, what can we apply this understanding to what other conflicts are out there? Not only from a defensive standpoint, but also how might warfare look in the future given what we've seen, given what we know now, given the lessons learned.”

So again, always, always a net negative, but definitely very instructive and illuminating things that we've come to understand from the war.

[Music playing]

Jakub: Lauren, thank you so much for that discussion. Truly, really interesting. It's such a fascinating topic to be covering. Thank you so much.

Lauren: Yeah, thanks Jakub for having me on today. Really appreciate it.

Jakub: Thank you so much for listening to Power Lines. We'll see you next week for our regular episode, where we'll be speaking to humanitarian aid worker Fedir Serdiuk about

Anastasiia: It was produced by Bea Duncan, Harry Stott and Talia Augustidis. The executive producer is Sandra Ferrari. The theme music is by Tom Biddle and Alfie Godfrey.

Season 1 Episode 8

PL_S1E8_Cyber Warfare_Transcription

[Music playing]

Jakub: A couple of weeks ago, Russian president Vladimir Putin, travelled to Minsk to visit one of his very last friends in the world.

Lukashenko: [Speaking foreign language].

Jakub: The charming voice you can hear is that of Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus. He looks like caricature of a moustachioed authoritarian. And here he's sneering that him and Putin are-

Lukashenko: [Speaking foreign language].

Jakub: Co-aggressors, the meanest, most toxic people on the planet. We only argue about who is worse. Vladimir Vladimirovich says I am. I've started to believe he is. We decided we're equal.

It's truly grim, gallows humor, a joke made on the back of the thousands of Ukrainians who have been killed this year. And the millions of Belarusians who continue to live without basic freedoms and human rights under his regime.

[Music playing]

Lukashenko and Belarus are indelibly linked to the war in Ukraine, a spectre on the northern border, which contains Europe's last dictatorship. They are now an international pariah who have assisted Russia in the war already. And following this meeting in Minsk, may be compelled by Putin to do so even more. It's a country whose people have suffered hugely in recent years.

Pavel: My name's Pavel Liber and I'm a software engineer. I was born in Belarus and I had to leave my country in 2020 because of political situations, protests and punishments personally against me from government officials.

Jakub: I'm speaking to Pavel Liber from his new base in Vilnius. He's an IT specialist, but was forced to leave Belarus for his role in setting up an election monitoring system, during the last elections in the country, in 2020.

Speaker 1: “In Belarus, huge crowds of protestors have been demonstrating against President Alexander Lukashenko and the election that they say he rigged, two weeks ago.”

Jakub: You'll remember the footage of the protest that followed Lukashenko falsified results in the election.

Speaker 2: “Our aim is to show the government that we are not their slaves.”

Jakub: He claimed to have won 60 or 70% of the votes. No credible organisation at home or abroad believes him.

[Protest chants]

I wanted to speak to Pavel about the role IT played in the revolution and a fascinating project he's working on, to help his fellow exiled compatriots.

Jakub (interview): Can you tell us a little bit about your role during that time? Because I believe that you were involved in this as well from an election monitoring perspective.

Pavel: Yes, exactly. So, that's exactly the place where IT managed to change everything together with people in the country. I was one of creator of platform called Golos, that was a platform to specifically reevaluate results of official elections.

That was a platform where we asked people to send us their polling sheets with their choices, and we duplicated them and allocated them to right polling stations and we compared them with official results.

Then we got few difference with official results. Because on one of polling station in Minsk, we had official protocols with like 1000 voices for Lukashenko and 100 voices for Tsikhanouskay. And then in same time from exactly these polling stations, we had 800 pictures with voices for Tsikhanouskay.

And that was the first case where we managed to do this process of falsification to transparent and public for everyone. People found with their own eyes actually, that there are huge falsifications during presidential elections.

[Music playing]

Jakub: The protest against Lukashenko turned into the largest anti-government protests ever in Belarus. But the crackdown was equally brutal. There were thousands of arrests and testimonies of torture were frequent.

It played out online as well. Seeing the ways in which people were using platforms like Facebook and Telegram to rally during the protests, the internet was pretty much taken offline by Lukashenko’s regime.

Pavel told me a huge amount of the IT sector in Belarus has now left the country because of the repressions. But becoming an asylum seeker comes with an extraordinary amount of challenges, from language barriers to bureaucratic issues. Even meeting fellow Belarusians in exile can be a challenge.

So, Pavel decided to set up a really ambitious project to counter this. It's called Digital Belarus, and it's the first platform of its kind. In essence a virtual country.

Pavel: Yes, it's pretty important project and we work on that exactly since end of 2020. And that's ecosystem which we consider as virtual country, where we try to keep together people inside country, inside Belarus and outside country. And why we create that, because physical space is too dangerous for now, especially inside the country.

We have danger for people who stays in the country. And we have huge deculturalisation which happens now, because Russia tried to remove Belarus identity from the country. Russia tried to do a lot of movements to become Belarus part of Russia. So, they start to destroy language. They start to destroy cultures; they start to destroy nationality.

And this is a digital space, this is the answer for us. How to keep this identity, how to keep our people. And that's why we created huge platform actually considering of multiple products with main sense to gather Belarus people together in digital space, to connect them to each other, to allow them to resolve their needs through huge crowd involvement. So, that's kind of prototype of virtual country for us.

Jakub: Digital Belarus is an app you can access on your phone with a vast number of different products, all designed to help Belarusians living abroad. It's fundamentally about connecting fellow Belarusians together, so they have a place to maintain their culture and identity.

Pavel: And this application combines all events connected to Belarus culture, meet-ups connected to Belarus culture, internal chats, offline meetings. It's like all Tinder for small community.

We found through investigations that in countries like Germany, people who are refugees, they’re spreaded out all over the country, in a lot of small cities and their real challenge for them, how to find enough people from Belarus.

Jakub: But this is about more than just meetups. Pavel told me there are so many different levels to his virtual country. There's an economic layer where you can connect with banking services, a social element for young entrepreneurs to connect or find professional services. There's a health layer where Belarusian doctors are able to give patients online, medical advice.

There's also a media layer and a place for education. It's a really fascinating concept. You could even call it a metaverse, that word that is now so synonymous with Silicon Valley and Mark Zuckerberg. But this one feels so much more real, tangible and genuinely useful.

Jakub (interview): So, it's kind of integrating society and economy. But as you say, there's also another layer.

Pavel: Yeah, that's most important. That's actually political layer, how we call that. Because we understand that when you have a huge crowd of people who connected to each other, these people can start to resolve the issue themselves.

They're definitely some help from European Union, United States and other countries. But it never will be enough to return back your real country and to return back to home and to change dictatorship we have right now to a normal democracy country.

So, that's ultimate goal of our product, to not just connect people and support people, but also help them do something together, something important, which will help us to get back to our home.

Jakub: But with your entire digital self, stored online, this also sounds like a project which would be ripe for Russian hackers to try to break into. Cyber warfare has been a huge part of Russia's campaign against Ukraine and the West for years, something will be looking into later in this episode. So, how is Pavel and his team protecting against that?

Pavel: We don't have any single registry or single database. We use self-sovereign identity approach, when people able to store their identity fully decentralised and separate application. We work with partner here.

So, in fact, you store in your credentials and blockchain, you decide what scope of these credentials you're ready to transfer to one or another platform. It's important to understand that we fully keep in ability for people to be anonymous on our platform because there are still terror inside the country. 

Even people who are outside the country, their relatives, families can be under risk. That's why ability for people to stay anonymous is the key for us.

For now, we didn't see any real cyber-attacks from Belarus officials. While we still consider they can be, but probably not from Belarus, but with help of Russia because we understand that Lukashenko is using Putin’s supports as much as he can. 

Jakub: Russia is the world's most notorious perpetrator of cyber warfare. Many hacker groups that were previously thought to be non-state have been revealed to actually be part of the Russian Security Services.

But the anonymous, decentralised nature of Digital Belarus means they have a safeguard against that. At least for now.

[Music playing]

We don't often get to bring you good news stories on Power Lines, but I think this is one of them. It's a way for those who have left Belarus to fight back against the deculturalisation going on back home. And a way to ensure that when regime change happens in Belarus, they are prepared and ready to return.

It's also a platform that could help other displaced communities outside Belarus, Ukrainians included.

Theoretically, this is something that could be applied to a lot of nations and a lot of communities around the world. Is that something that you envisioned for Digital Belarus?

Pavel: Yes, you are exactly right that we are not unique here. It definitely can be applied to multiple nations. I have a lot of friends in Ukraine and some of them are helping me right now with multiple volunteering projects for Ukraine.

And we also were discussing with them of how we can reuse our experience for the social platform, for example, for Ukrainian refugees. So, I definitely hope that this solution that can be created for resolving case of Belarus, can be usable for lot of nations who are actually fighting against dictators, who are actually fighting against tyrants in their countries.

Anastasiia: From Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent, you're listening to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World.

Jakub: In this series, we're going to be mapping the undercurrents and global consequences of the war in Ukraine, beginning in Kyiv and following the roads out wherever they may lead. I'm Jakub Parusinski.

Anastasiia: And I'm Anastasiia Lapatina.

Jakub: This week we're taking a look at a different battlefield that has been extremely consequential over the course of the full-scale invasion. And actually, even more so beforehand, the war online, cyber warfare.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Kyiv. Nastya, you’re there now for the holidays. Have you had the same kind of difficulties getting online, that I did when I was there?

Anastasiia: Yeah, it's a really tough situation actually because for the last few days we've had really big problems with cell connection. So, just kind of driving around Kyiv, going around your business, it's pretty tough because a few days ago we've had another major Russian attack on our energy infrastructure. Like it really sucks. It's super annoying.

I was talking to some of my colleagues here at the Kyiv Independent, and it's really, really frustrating. Thankfully at the office, we have Starlink.

Jakub: It's incredible the burden really that it is to have to lead your everyday life without the usual access to electricity and internet.

Anastasiia: Also, my internet keeps on going off, so I don't know if you guys hear me or if it's just my thing.

Jakub: No, it just makes you sound really authentic, talking about internet problems.

Anastasiia: Okay.

Jakub: So, we were just talking about how the last couple of months really, Russia has pivoted to make these kind of attacks on the power grid, a major part of their attacks on Ukraine. Like that's been one of the big areas to sort of make civilian life much more difficult.

But that's actually not something that's necessarily that new because Ukraine had these kind of attacks on its power grid already about eight years ago. Except back then it was caused by cyber-attacks.

But what's interesting is that those attacks were part of a bigger story because they're still happening today. While most of the power outages are actually due to the missiles and the kamikaze drones that are hitting the power grid, there's still those same cyber-attacks that are cutting the power throughout Ukraine today.

And they're actually being run by the same group of people, a unit within the GRU, Russia's military intelligence services.

Anastasiia: Jakub, is there even a definition of cyber warfare? Because remember when I was studying like modern warfare in college, I remember it was this like very new kind of very mystical thing of the future, that we don't really know much about it and we can't really predict what it's going to look like, et cetera.

Jakub: So, it's definitely something that's quite confusing and I think a lot of people don't really realise how significant cyber warfare is. There's a lot of academic definitions, but the way that I sort of think about it is that it's everything related to using digital capabilities and digital infrastructure to wreak havoc on your opponent.

And that can mean a lot of things. That can mean the simplest one of just making the computers not work, so to speak which doesn't seem that bad. All the way to making data disappear, making systems malfunction and be unable to be rebooted and all the way to causing actual physical damage.

Anastasiia: Cyber warfare also definitely has the capacity to cause a loss of life. It's just that that hasn't happened yet because it's quite a new method, but there is a possibility of that anyway. So, it's pretty dangerous.

[Music playing]

But it is important and it is the subject of today’s episode, right?

Jakub: Exactly. Just before the holidays, we decided to look at the topic of cybersecurity, cyber espionage and especially cyber warfare. So, I had a chance to have a chat with the New York based writer and journalist, Andy Greenberg.

Andy is a senior writer at Wired where he covers hacking, cybersecurity and surveillance. That naturally means that he has turned his focus to Russia and its cyber capabilities in recent years.

And in 2019, he published a book, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers. This was one of the first books to really dig into who this group actually is and their links with the Russian Security Services, something that we really got into during our conversation.

But to start off, we actually looked at Ukraine in the 2010s because according to Andy, this was the place where the first modern cyber war broke out.

Andy Greenberg, thank you so much for joining us on Power Lines. Before jumping into the current situation and the war between Ukraine and Russia, I'd like to go back a couple of years to what has been described by some, and I think including yourself as the sort of first case of cyber war, the NotPetya attacks back in June of 2017.

Can you tell us a little bit about it and why this was part of something bigger unlike sort of the, let's say, smaller scale or more one-off cyber warfare attacks that we had seen in the past?

Andy: Yeah, I would say that what occurred in Ukraine, really starting in 2014 or 2015 at the latest is (I don’t know), what I've described as the first full blown cyber war in history.

But this yearslong cyber war in Ukraine is unique. Really, it was the first kind of sustained yearslong series of cyber-attacks on dozens of targets with destructive effects and not just data destroying effects.

But in some cases, it was meant to have what we sometimes call like cyber physical effects, where a cyber-attack reaches out into civilian critical infrastructure and does something like turns off the lights. Which is what happened in December of 2015, the first time that hackers ever caused a blackout was in Ukraine where they hit a few electric utilities in the west of Ukraine and turned off the power for a quarter million people that had never occurred before.

And it is in some sense the kind of quintessential act of cyber war to cause physical effects with a hacker attack. And Russia's hackers did that in Ukraine, not once, but twice. They did it again in late 2016.

And those two blackout attacks came in the midst of a larger campaign of cyber-attacks that just sort of used dated destroying malware to destroy as many computers as possible inside of Ukrainian media companies and government agencies and the treasury and the ministry of finance and the railway system for instance. And that all was just leading up to NotPetya, which would be the worst cyber-attack in history.

Jakub: We have this cyber war that has erupted between Russia and Ukraine. And then as you mentioned, it culminates in a sense with the 2017 attacks of NotPetya. Why was this different?

Andy: From 2014 to early 2017, Russia's cyber-attacks in Ukraine were big and indiscriminate, but they were still kind of targeted in a way. They would like choose one organisation and try to destroy its network or in the case of these electric utilities in the west of Ukraine and then in Kyiv, they would very deliberately target those utilities to cause a blackout.

But then NotPetya was different, because with NotPetya they essentially released a self-spreading, self-replicating piece of malicious code, a worm that was designed to spread essentially everywhere in Ukraine. It took advantage of the software updates of a piece of Ukrainian accounting software called MeDoc.

And so, it was targeted at Ukraine, but really, everybody in Ukraine uses this accounting software to pay their taxes. And so, because they did this, what we call a software supply chain attack, where they essentially used the software updates of MeDoc to turn it into a piece of malware, everywhere in Ukraine that had the software installed suddenly was infected with NotPetya.

But that's just the beginning because NotPetya was designed to automatically spread. So, it very quickly, if you have one infection of NotPetya on your network, it saturates the entire network and destroys essentially all of your computers.

So, NotPetya wasn't just targeted at one organisation like those prior cyber-attacks. It was targeted at the entire country and it did destroy hundreds of organisations, networks inside of Ukraine. Dozens of banks, multiple airports, half a dozen hospitals across the country, by my account, every government agency essentially had all of their computers destroyed, in many cases in a matter of minutes.

The minister of infrastructure of Ukraine, Volodymyr Omelyan told me that the government was just dead. Like every government agency’s computers were just completely wiped by NotPetya. In a way that was indiscriminate in the sense that it just targeted everything in Ukraine.

Of course, NotPetya then, because it was a self-spreading worm, it doesn't respect national borders. And within hours it had spread beyond Ukraine and eventually took down all of these massive multinational corporations around the world and caused $10 billion in damage.

And shut down the world's largest shipping company and FedEx and Mondelez and the manufacturer of food and pharmaceuticals and destroyed medical record systems and hospitals across United States. The effects of NotPetya globally were truly unprecedented, but it did all start in Ukraine.

Jakub: So, looking back at that time, I think a lot of the people thought about it as well, Ukraine is essentially a testing ground. The first battlefield on which to test your cyber weapons that you can then deploy internationally. With hindsight, how do you see it? Do you think it was more about testing things, more about attacking Ukraine? A bit of both?

Andy: All along people have described Ukraine as this test lab for Russia's cyber war capabilities and warned that sooner or later, like all of these attacks that we were seeing in Ukraine, that we'd never seen anywhere else in the world, that Russia would then use those same cyber weapons as they've been described on the West or on other countries.

And they weren't wrong. First of all, NotPetya did very literally hit Ukraine and then spread to the rest of the world and do more damage than any cyber-attack anyone has ever seen before or since.

But then also we saw the same hackers, and by the way, everything I've described so far has been carried out by one group of hackers known as Sandworm, who are now known to be a unit inside of Russia's GRU military intelligence agency.

So, it's absolutely true that the extremely reckless and brazen cyber-attacks of this one group really, of the GRU more broadly do have international effects. All that was right, those warnings were correct.

But then I think also now looking back after almost a year of this full-scale invasion, you can also see the cyber war from 2014 to 2022 or so, as a different kind of harbinger, as like the preview of the way that Russia carries out war. And the way that it does not distinguish between military and civilian targets, the way that in fact it kind of prefers to attack civilians in an attempt to weaken the resolve of Ukraine in these endless conflicts.

And the way specifically that it targets civilian critical infrastructure as a way to kind of cripple Ukrainian society. You can kind of see the same thing happening now with the way that the Russian military is attacking the Ukrainian power grid. Like it's sort of now focused, I would say, on an even more kind of critical piece of infrastructure that is at the foundation of so much of daily life in Ukraine.

[Music playing]

Anastasiia: So, back in January of 2022, it was roughly a month before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. There was a major cyber-attack on Ukrainian government websites. And I was actually the person who broke that story for KI.

And I remember it was a very weird morning because we broke that story at 9:00 AM and I started going online and seeing on Twitter and on Facebook how this service doesn't work and this little service doesn't work. And it became obvious that something's happening.

First of all, this was like the first time that I as a conscious adult experienced kind of like a cyber-attack happening around me and in my country. And like watching it unfold was a very bizarre experience because it was pretty scary to be honest, because … well, it's not something tangible.

It's not like a missile attack that you can see, whereas a cyber-attack, it's kind of like everywhere and nowhere and you don't really know where it's going to go, how it's going to unfold.

Jakub: And how to react, right?

Anastasiia: And how to react too, right. So, I was like, “Am I personally somehow compromised? Like, is my data on my phone compromised because I'm using the same government services?”

So, that's pretty much my experience, the one that I remember. But what about you, were you in Ukraine at the time of any of these attacks in the power grid, that were in 2015, 2016 and later?

Jakub: No, I was already out of Ukraine. But what I think now is very, … it's almost shocking how obvious it was that this wasn't just the equivalent of a missile test. It was the start of (as Andy himself puts it), the first real cyber war. And looking back it looks very much like the run up to the full-scale invasion.

[Music playing]

Anastasiia: Okay. So, we mentioned the group called Sandworm. It's this Russian hacker group. Andy mentions them too, and I've heard of them, but who are they?

Jakub: That's exactly what I got into with Andy next. How did you find out that it was Sandworm behind these attacks and sort of what was the journey to discovering their work?

Andy: Yeah, yeah. Let me see. So, I picked up this story quite late, like my editors at Wired in late 2016 asked me to find like the big story of cyber war. And I wasn't even sure that cyber war was a real phenomenon at that point.

So, I went looking for where was cyber war actually happening? And I of course had read about like that first blackout attack that hackers had carried out in Ukraine. Just as I was looking into this, it happened again and it hit the capitol of Kyiv.

And so, I began to see like, yes, there is actually an unfolding real cyber war happening in Ukraine. So, I went to Ukraine, I met with like incident responders at cybersecurity companies there, and then I also started speaking to kind of like global observers and analysts who were pulling apart the malware used in these different attacks.

And it all seemed to be being carried out by one hacker group. And of course, everybody suspected they were Russian. And there were a couple of clues that showed that this group did appear to be Russian. And this one hacker group, they had even included in their malware samples references to the science fiction novel, Dune.

And so, the group that discovered them, which was at this little company called iSight Partners, had named them Sandworm, in a reference to like these sort of like giant monsters in that book series.

Now Sandworm did appear to be Russian. There were some clues, like they had at one point sort of left open one of their command-and-control servers, and the analysts who had discovered them saw that they had like a Russian language how-to manual for one of their pieces of malware in there.

It still wasn't proven if they were really Russian or if they were Russian government or Russian non-government hackers. And it was only years later that analysts at the cybersecurity firm, FireEye began to make connections and showed that in fact, one of Sandworm's attacks, and it was in fact the Olympic Destroyer malware, that's what it was called, like this attack that hit the 2018 Olympics.

That certain kind of giveaways in the infrastructure of that attack, the command-and-control servers and where they were hosted identified them essentially as this one group that had already been named in a criminal indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice, not related to Ukraine or any of these destructive cyber-attacks, but the Russian hacker meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

It was actually the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, into the U.S. election meddling that had first named this Russian hacker group as being part of the GRU, but also these two units within the GRU. One was Unit 26165 and one was Unit 74455. And after that Olympics attack some commonalities in the servers that those hackers had used, essentially identified them as being Unit 74455 of the GRU.

And that meant that in fact, once you could tie all of this together in a kind of a web of forensics, you could then see at least in theory that all of these attacks from those blackout attacks in 2015 and 2016 and the data destroying attacks that had hit these targeted attacks against the Ukrainian government and civilians and media, and then finally NotPetya, that all of it had been carried out by this one GRU unit. That Sandworm was in fact this Unit 74455 of the GRU.

And I published that theory in my book as just a theory really. And then just a few months later, the state department in the U.S. and then later the NSA and then finally the Justice Department all confirmed, yes, Sandworm is Unit 74455 of the GRU. And in fact, six of those Russian hackers were indicted by name about a year after the book came out.

But it's kind of still almost an empty gesture. It's like a way to send a signal to Russia to say this is not okay. That this is a crime that these hackers have committed, a series of crimes, in fact. But it's very unlikely they'll ever be arrested or face charges in any court of law.

[Music playing]

Jakub: It sounds like a big chunk of these global hackers and various cyber warfare groups are Russian. And it's quite frightening really to see how much resources Russia has dedicated to this and how many specialists it has produced in this area.

Anastasiia: Yeah, it's pretty insane. They have this whole infrastructure for cyber warfare that's engraved in their education system. They've got programs on information security, which is what they call it, but it's actually on hacking and propaganda online. They have this program taught in like hundreds of universities. They also have specific institutes that were created and run, affiliated with the government to teach experts in this field.

Jakub: Yeah, it's kind of amazing to see that having a choice of where to sort of invest in technology, Russia has chosen this one. There's a fair amount of tradition of the Soviet Union and then later Russia or earlier also Russia sort of being a pioneer when it comes to various technologies. In the last 20 years, what's really been Russia's claim to fame in terms of advancing technology, has been hacking and cyber warfare.

Anastasiia: I think maybe another reason why they're using cyber so much is the impunity that that gives you. Because as Andy has talked about, you can't really do anything about it.

And with cyber, it's very difficult, I think to first of all link a government to these activities. Like it's very difficult to trace who is actually behind them. And then also, what are you going to do about this information? How are you going to punish them? And what are we looking at next, Jakub?

[Music playing]

Jakub: Now I wanted to bring things up to the present to see how Russia has been conducting a hybrid war, including cyber-attacks since the full-scale invasion.

Moving forward to the current phase of the war, the full-scale invasion, the global attention has been very much focused on the more physical kinetic aspect of the war, the bombings, the shellings, the tanks, the troops, the trenches.

Cyber has taken a little bit of a backseat in terms of at least the media's intention. How do you feel about that? Is it something that has been present as part of the war effort over these last nine months?

Andy: I guess first, I think it's important to say that I think that the fact that people have not been too focused on cyber war once the physical invasion and the bombing and the war crimes in Ukraine began, I think that that makes sense because that is a human cost that is far higher than any cyber-attack. It's not even the same order of magnitude, it's not close.

Nonetheless, like that doesn't mean that Russia's cyber war in Ukraine has stopped. Just because we've stopped paying attention to it for a good reason, it doesn't mean that cyber-attacks are not like barraging Ukraine in a way where if they were happening to some other country, it would be one of the biggest cyber wars we've ever observed in history. Russia has continued to attack dozens of targets across Ukraine.

I've heard from Ukrainian officials that they've seen hundreds of breaches of their electric utilities and finance industry and government agencies. In many cases, I would say in probably dozens of those cases, there have been actual destructive cyber-attacks as part of the intrusion. And they have been, I would say, on a smaller scale than what we saw previous to 2022.

But they've been faster and more numerous and kind of more agile. And you can kind of see in a way that the GRU, in particular, the same agency that was responsible for all of Sandworm's attacks, that they're almost like speeding up their pace and accelerating to try to keep up with the pace of this war.

And they don't have time to prepare these kind of like exquisite perfectly planned acts of destruction like NotPetya or even those power grid attacks. They actually tried to carry out a third power grid attack and it failed this year.

But they are carrying out these kind of relentless, simpler, get in, destroy a lot of data and get out kind of attacks.

Jakub: So, maybe turning to the side of Ukraine, one of the big surprises was I think how well Ukraine's infrastructure, digital infrastructure held up throughout the war.

I remember we were supporting a lot of media in the early weeks of the war, and one of the things that we were concerned about is something as simple as bank transfers and sort of the possibility of the banking system going down.

It never really happened. It's not that I'm fishing for a compliment for Ukrainian services, but what do you think sort of happened here? Like how did they manage to sort of withstand that?

Andy: I have to just admit like maybe that I don't really know exactly how Ukraine has managed to improve its defenses so noticeably in this round, after so many years of successful cyber-attacks.

You would think like after perhaps two years of like the worst cyber-attacks we've ever seen in the world in 2015 and 2016 and two blackout attacks, you would think that would be enough for Ukrainians to have just thrown everything they have at defending against these kinds of hackers. And yet still we saw NotPetya hit the next year, so-

But now it does seem like something has shifted and Ukrainians defenders are winning, in many more cases than in the past at least. And we saw, for instance, that the third attempted blackout, which was carried out by the same hackers using a new version of like one of their same pieces of malware, this kind of automated power grid attack malware called Industroyer or Crashoverride.

They tried that again in 2022 and it didn't work. And I don't know how that attack was foiled, and I'm sure that has a lot do with Ukrainians now being some of the most experienced in the world at fending off these sorts of attacks.

But I also think it has something to do with the rest of the world and the West sort of waking up to what was happening in Ukraine. For so many years the United States and Europe and the whole world really just watched what was happening in Ukraine and sort of treated it as someone else's problem.

Like this is not NATO, this is not the EU, this is Russia's sphere of influence and they can do what they want there even after NotPetya, which spread around the world and did $10 billion in damage or more. It took nine months for there to be any real response from like a Western government to call out and hold accountable the GRU for this unprecedented his like history making cyber-attack.

Now I think that the West has woken up and you've seen even just in the days before the war began, for instance, there were a series of distributed denial of service cyber-attacks on Ukrainian websites. And these are really basic simple attacks where you just kind of flood websites with junk traffic.

And it took only days for the White House, like an actual White House press conference to call out the GRU specifically for those cyber-attacks on Ukrainian websites.

That's compared to, in some cases years for anybody to say like that the same GRU hackers had carried out a cyber-attack on the Olympics. It took two years for that to be called out. And now we see these like much simpler, smaller stakes attacks called out in days.

So, the West has woken up to the fact that Russia is abusing Ukraine in ways that are unacceptable and like those attacks are now condemned almost immediately.

But also, what that means, I think is that the U.S. and European countries are supporting Ukraine not just with weapons and its physical war. But I think with support and in its cyber war as well.

And we've seen some hints that like U.S. Cyber Command is consulting with Ukraine, that there are, I think even us kind of cybersecurity officials on the grounds, if not in Ukraine, then in Poland, like in NATO. And they're working to help Ukraine fend off these attacks.

But I think that that has played a big role in foiling some of the most consequential Russian cyber-attacks that have targeted Ukraine since the beginning of 2022.

[Music playing]

Anastasiia: I think a big part of the story of Ukraine's resilience to Russian cyber warfare specifically since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, is the fact that we've had huge help from our western allies. And it's more than that.

I think it's the fact that helping Ukraine with cyber capabilities is a pretty easy way to help. Like it's not sending tanks, it's not sending some weapons that can potentially anger Putin or something like that.

It's just sending experts to us, which many of our allies in the West have done in the lead up to the war and then after the war began. Yeah, I think it's a pretty simple way to help.

Jakub: Yeah. And I think just over the last couple of years as well, it seems that that cooperation has sort of stepped up. Ukraine has clearly developed some pretty robust capabilities, whether it's to sort of defend yourself from attacks or kind of create redundancy in the systems to make you less exposed.

Because one of the things that has been kind of unexpected and incredible to see for me is just how resilient, for example, the Ukrainian banking system has been since the beginning of the world. Like at no point has it been really that difficult.

Anastasiia: I think that is just a testament to how amazing our services are in general.

Jakub: No, and the thing that people also don't realise is that Ukraine is a very digital country.

Anastasiia: Oh, yeah. Which is actually an interesting point in relation to cyber warfare because remember when we were just launching Diia, which is basically a government app that has an individual's main documents. Like your license, your passport, we have all of that information online.

Jakub: Ukraine is one of the only, if not the only country where-

Anastasiia: The only.

Jakub: The only one where electronic documents are equivalent.

Anastasiia: Equivalent.

Jakub: Yeah. Physical ones.

Anastasiia: Yeah, yeah. But I remember when the government was just drawing that out, there were a lot of skeptics. Exactly because of the fact that whoa, a lot of this is now online and our neighbor is definitely going to try to attack it. So Jakub, what are we ending with?

[Music playing]

Jakub: We're ending with what the international community is doing to stand up to these attacks from Russia. Like with so many other aspects of the war, it's really been a turning point.

Do you think that this is, let's say, the West is now more mobilised to work together to counter the threat of Russian cyber-attacks?

Andy: Yeah, well there's no question that the West has woken up to the danger of Russian cyber-attacks that they no longer kind of like are willing to let Ukraine be treated as this testing ground, that's sort of fair game for Russia. As I think was sort of like implicitly communicated to Russia for years, when Russian hackers turn off the lights in Ukraine for the first time in history with a cyber-attack. And there is no response whatsoever. The West was basically telling Russia, “That's okay, yeah, keep going. It's fine. That's your target to mess with.”

And that was absolutely an enormous missed opportunity to kind of set rules for how countries should behave with their cyber-attack capabilities and to draw lines, to draw red lines around civilian critical infrastructure.

And now, there's no question that the West is trying to make those rules a little belatedly. And I think also we see some evidence Western countries are going a step further and they are mobilising, they are trying to like in concrete ways, help a non-NATO country like Ukraine to defend itself, not just physically, where the U.S. has spent billions of dollars to arm Ukraine, but also in the digital world.

And I think that that makes sense. I think that that's necessary and it's important to show a country like Russia that if you go after civilians, whether it's bombing the power grid or releasing a piece of malware, like NotPetya, not only will you be condemned, but you will face kind of concerted defense with kind of global reinforcements.

Jakub: Maybe just to close this this discussion. So, you wrote your book about Sandworm a few years ago. Looking at the situation now for the next years, the next decade, how do you feel? Is it a bit more optimistic given that people are taking these threats more seriously? There's more mobilisation.

Or even more dystopian given just what we're seeing in terms of the threats that are out there and the potential benefits of waging cyber war against your enemies?

Andy: It's a really good question. Yes, absolutely. Like I tried in Sandworm to warn that cyber warfare, if it is not kind of controlled with diplomacy and almost like something like a Geneva Convention for cyber war, that it could spiral out of control. It could become a new force of chaos in the world.

I think what I've seen in the years since the book came out is actually kind of hopeful. I've seen Western officials and my own government in the United States sort of wake up to this and sort of end their pattern of negligence and like stop ignoring the GRU's reckless, insanely destructive attacks in Ukraine.

There's no Geneva Convention for cyber war, but there is a new kind of awareness and a new kind of vigilance about cyber-attacks. And also, Sandworm was indicted. They have been criminally charged for their sort of crime spree across the world.

And I think that that is part of why we haven't seen, for instance, like another NotPetya. Like we've never since NotPetya, seen an attack of that size or worse, which is what I feared back when I published this book in 2019.

But even as there are these kinds of signs of hope and like a silver lining, which is that it does seem like cyber warfare may actually be being brought under control or that there's an attempt to do that. The story of the book, I think now can be seen in a much sadder way as a preview of what we would see in this full-blown war in Ukraine starting this year.

The way that Sandworm demonstrates Russia's callousness towards damage, collateral damage, civilian damage in Ukraine and around the world, we've seen this elsewhere too from Chechnya to Syria.

But in Ukraine, like you can see just how brutal the Russian military's approaches and the ways that they're willing to not only accidentally hit civilians, but to target civilians and civilian critical infrastructure just as a way to score points in this war.

[Music playing]

Anastasiia: In two weeks in Power Lines, we're going to be focusing again on the Russian security services with the journalist and author, Michael Weiss. But this time as a whole looking at the history of the FSB, the successor of the KGB and its military counterpart, the GRU and what their role has been during Russia's war in Ukraine.

Jakub: If you want to further support us, you can subscribe to our ad free feed on Apple and by looking up Power Lines + on Spotify. You can also support the Kyiv Independent by finding us on our Patreon, to get behind the scenes content. Go to patreon.com/kyivindependent to continue helping us report on the most important stories in Ukraine.

Anastasiia: Look up Message heard wherever you're listening to this podcast for more of our original shows. And find us on our website at messageheard.com or on our Power Lines Twitter @PowerLinesPod, as well as Instagram and Facebook by looking up at Message Heard.

Jakub: You can also follow the Kyiv Independent on Twitter and Facebook at Kyiv Independent and Instagram at kyivindependent_official, to get the latest news and stay up to date with our coverage. Please also subscribe and rate Power Lines in your podcast app as it really helps others find our show.

Anastasiia: Power Lines is a partnership between the Kyiv Independent and Message Heard. It was produced by Bea Duncan, Harry Stott and Talia Augustidis. The executive producer is Sandra Ferrari. The theme music is by Tom Biddle and Alfie Godfrey.

Bonus Episode 7

Power Lines Episode 7 Bonus Transcript

Ed: In March I put the news on and there was a little girl on a train with her mother, and her father was on the platform. He put his hand on the train window and she put her hand on the train window. And that was it. I was just, ahhhh!

So I rang my daughters and I said, listen, I've had enough of this. I’m going. 

Jakub: Ed Blackbird is the managing director of a windows and blinds company in Gateshead, in the North East of England. In March this year, he drove to Kyiv with aid for the Ukrainian people. 

Ed: So came at the factory, put an appeal out and said, “Listen guys, looking for some help. I'm desperate to get down to Ukraine with some much needed aid, anybody who want to help?” And within an hour, people will queue up outside the factory in the showroom.

With not just money we had clothes and food, paracetamol. They were queuing up, it was just unbelievable. So, I borrowed a huge trailer and off I went with about 500,000 pound worth of aid. 

Nastya: This Christmas, Ed is heading back to Kyiv with three of his colleagues. On December 20th they’ll load up the trucks, take the ferry to Amsterdam, drive through Germany and Poland, then down to Ukraine to arrive on Christmas Eve. 

Ed: And again We've just been inundated with cash. We've not done a sub-total yet, but it's well in excess of 20,000. Well in excess. 

We've ordered generators now. To date we're up to somewhere like 36 or possibly 40. We've just been inundated with infant presents, children's presents, teenage presents, and moms and dads. 

Everything's been beautifully wrapped. We've had a young football team come a couple of nights ago and wrap, and if I said a couple hundred, that would be wrong. It would be a couple of thousand presents that we’re taken down there for families. It's just, it's wonderful. Really is beautiful.

Jakub: The whole community of Gateshead came together. Even those who didn’t have much to give themselves. 

Ed: This beautiful old lady came into the showroom. She was in her eighties, and she was holding two chocolate bars and she said, “Are you the guy going to Ukraine for Christmas?” 

I said, “Yes, I am”. She said, “I've not got a lot of money, but I would love if you could take these two chocolate bars to Ukraine and give them to somebody for Christmas.”

And I was like, “My God”. You know, got quite upset with that. And she said,” I'm gonna do the same thing next week. I've not got a lot of money. I’m gonna get my groceries in and I want to buy another two chocolate bars”. So she came back again. So I'm taking four chocolate bars from the Northeast, from this beautiful lady, to Ukraine. 

Another guy came in, he was in his seventies and he brought a brand new little jacket, looked about, maybe a six year old’s jacket. 

He says, “If I thought my grandchild was cold, I couldn't live for myself. So will you take that jacket down and give it to a little girl? And he says, “I'll give you the receipt just in case he doesn't like it!” Ha! God bless him.

[Music]

Jakub: For many Ukrainians, holiday celebrations will look different this year. Some are in foreign countries, separated from friends and family. Some will have an empty seat at the dinner table. Christmas lights will be a little dimmer.

From Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent, you're listening to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World. 

Nastya: In this bonus episode, we wanted to use this time of reflection to catch up with some of our Ukrainian guests throughout the series. 

Jakub: Nastya, it almost feels incredible, but we are both at home for Christmas time. 

Nastya: Yeah, it's shocking. Neither of us have really been at home much during these recordings. 

We’ve recorded from DC– 

Jakub: Thailand.

Nastya: –various places in Poland. But yeah, I just arrived home roughly a week ago, and I'm here for a bit over a month and it’s lovely. 

And I don't even go to Kiev, I live on the outskirts, so I'm just literally staying in my room, in our living room, not exiting the place because I missed everything so much. 

Jakub: I just got home about a week ago. I came back from Ukraine and it has been just such a joy to spend time with family in a very freezing London, but still, still it's nice to be back. 

Nastya, how are you feeling now that you are, you have a chance to be back with family? Do you have any particular Christmas traditions? 

Nastya: Yeah this is a really interesting discussion actually, because my family, we never really celebrated Christmas, and then there's this whole thing that Ukraine kind of has two Christmases.

Well, I… Okay, can you explain how it is that we have two different Christmas dates? 

So for our listeners, the majority of Ukrainians have always celebrated Christmas on January 6th to 7th. So how, how is that, why is that? 

Jakub: And actually, it's not just Christmas, it's also about New Years. So, Basically the difference comes down to two different types of calendars.

In the West, we use the Gregorian calendar. In the East, people use the Julian calendar, which doesn't have the quarter day for leap years. 

So over time, over the centuries, there's about two weeks of difference between the two. 

Nastya: Yeah. so we mainly celebrated New Year's, and I think this was the case for the majority of Ukrainians.

This may sound weird for our listeners, but this also has a lot to do with the Soviet legacy that Ukraine has because the Soviet government repressed our Christmas for decades and emphasised the importance of New Year instead, and created a lot of Soviet traditions on New Years. 

You know, the songs that people would sing on New Years, the costumes, our kind of Soviet “Santa Claus”, we call him, Ded Moroz. All of that was really connected with the Soviet propaganda. 

And Christmas, because it was a religious holiday, we couldn't really celebrate it because, of course, the Soviets repressed the church in general, they were very anti-religious. 

They killed a lot of bishops, et cetera. They closed down churches, they burned them down, and obviously religious holidays were a part of the wave of repression.

So I've heard stories from people who lived in Western Ukraine…

Okay, speaking of family, Jakub, your daughter just walked in. 

Okay, Milanka. Say hello. Say hello. She's waving, but she's not saying hello. Say hello.

Nastya: This is the cutest child I have ever seen, Jakub.

Jakub: Yes. Uh oh, and she's so happy.

Milanka: Uh oh. 

Jakub: Oh no!

Milanka: Oh no. 

Jakub: Okay, Milanka, thank you so much for that contribution. You could leave now. 

Nasta: Oh God, forget everything I was saying about The Church and the Soviets. This is prime content. 

So, of course religious holidays were a part of this wave of repression. And I've heard stories from people who lived in Western Ukraine about how it was so tough on Christmas that Ukrainians during the Soviet era had to close down all the blinds because you need to light up candles during Christmas and they had to do this in secret, so nobody sees them.

Because Soviet like NKDV soldiers, and like the Soviet police would walk around on this date checking for people who still follow the Ukrainian traditional kind of religious holidays. 

And so apparently the next morning after families celebrated Christmas, kids could tell. What other children are part of the local traditional Ukrainian community because their fingers smelled like wax.

Because you could tell that, you know, last night they were secretly celebrating Christmas.

Jakub: Oh wow. 

Nastya: It's so sad and tragic, but there's also so much magic in this because, you know, you cannot take our Christmas away from us. So for when, when I learned about all of this, I understood that New Years actually has very little to do with us as Ukrainians.

Just a year ago I celebrated New Year's with my family. We did all of the dishes that are traditionally Russian without really realising that they are as such. It's just that Ukraine has had to like take that in and appropriate that because of the Soviet legacy. It just came naturally. 

So that's how I remember holidays for myself. But then, we're not celebrating New Year’s this year, for the first time in my life. We're gonna be celebrating Christmas and I learned and like read up on all of the Ukrainian Christmas dishes and I'm gonna try to make all of them and it's gonna be a whole thing. So we're going full Ukrainian this year.

Okay, Jakub, tell me about your family. Are you gonna have some sort of traditional Ukrainian celebration or– 

Jakub: On my wife's side it's more… For them because they're very not religious, I would say, it's more about making New Year's your own. 

Nastya: Right. 

Jakub: So a couple of years ago you'd start by actually celebrating New Year's on Moscow time. Right? Like first you had to– you'd watch Putin say something or you know, whoever the president was, but for the last two decades it was Putin.

Nastya: And then you'd watch our president. 

Jakub: Exactly. Exactly. And then you'd celebrate New Year's on all the different time zones. So given that we're a little bit all over the place, we'd usually watch first Putin, then Ukraine, then Poland, slash France, and then finally UK. 

Nastya: That is so fascinating. 

Jakub: But I think now we're making it more and more our own. And you know, this year there wasn't even a consideration to celebrate it on Moscow time. We did, however, think about potentially adding Tbilisi time. 

Nastya: Just out of solidarity?

Jakub: Exactly out of solidarity for the Georgians.

[Music]

Jakub: We usually say “beginning in Kyiv, and following the roads out wherever they may lead”, but in this episode it seems a lot of roads lead back to Kyiv. Our first returning guest has also travelled back to Ukraine. 

Edward Reese is a Queer activist, we spoke to him about Kyiv Pride in the Europe episode. Back then, he was living in Denmark, after a summer of organising pride events around Europe. 

But in October, he came back to Kyiv.

Nastya: So we asked him about his plans for the holidays:

Edward: I am not a Christian, so I celebrate Juul Tide, starting from 21st and up till the New Year's Eve.

I will be going to different parties, if we have some here. And I will be cooking some delicious food. I really hope that I will be able to do some gingerbread cookies because I love them very much. It's like one of my personal favourite on the holiday season. 

And I will be going to the place where is like a big Christmas tree, which is also very symbolic. This year we have a Christmas tree in Kyiv, but it's much less bright than before, because we have to save energy.

And it was paid not by the city as usual, but it was paid by donators, businesses and so it's like more just a symbol that New Year has come in, not like a big celebration. We will not have a Christmas Village, for example. We have it always, but not this year.

I would love to travel when the war is over and I have a little dream to spend Christmas and Christmas time in Stockholm because I love the city and I could do it this year, but it's not the story because when the war in my country, I just can't feel all this Christmas mood and festive mood and so on. So I decided that like when the war is over, when we defeat Russia, I will definitely go and celebrate some Christmas time in Sweden.

Nastya: We also caught up with Alyona Zhuk, who we spoke to in our episode about Ukraine’s history. She’s a Ukrainian tattoo artist and illustrator who left for Berlin at the start of the full scale invasion. 

Alyona: I'm getting adjusted in a way of now knowing where I can buy groceries that I need and how I navigate the roots in between home and work and the school for my kid. 

Also she started school and she started her integration process. I think she's learning two languages now, German and English. 

And it's been kind of difficult, but I hear from her and from her teachers that she's doing okay and she's quite motivated and catching everything quickly and it's stressful but I think we're coping. 

Jakub: Her German residency documents haven’t yet been finalised, so she can’t return home for the holidays this year. 

Alyona: Honestly, I don't have any Christmassy/New-Yeary celebratory mood this year, I think for the first time in my life actually, because usually this season is one of my favourites and I enjoy snow and the decorations and the smells and the tastes and the sounds of New Year’s. 

So we will be here in Berlin and I know that my kid, she's very excited about New Year's and Christmas time, especially about the European Christmas because she's going to school with German kids. So they're talking about these traditions and she wants that. She wants the Christmas tree early and celebrate everything as well as they do.

And I know that I will have to kind of provide this Christmas/New Year's stuff for her because the entire point of me taking her out of Ukraine was for her to have childhood, for her to be able to be happy, even though those awful things are still happening. She knows that, but still she's a child.

So we'll do a Christmas tree. I’m taking vacation for this season and we will plan a celebratory activity for every day of her vacation. 

Like we will decorate the tree, we will cook the cookies, we will cut out paper snowflakes, we will go to the Christmas markets, we will eat something there. We will try to enjoy it as much as it's possible now.

But of course, I think the closer the new year, the more I will miss the idea of spending New Year as I would do it if I would be able to go to visit my parents and to be with them. 

Living so far from home, not having my home, not being able to see my parents and my friends and to not be able to have my routine… 

So I think, I mean the idea of New Year is kind of lost for me, I think, because the  only thing that I think all of us wish for the new year this year is that the new year will bring the victory that we are fighting for. 

I think all of us wish that every day, so that will not be much of a difference for us.

Nastya: And of course, integrating into a new country with new Christmas traditions isn’t always seamless:

Alyona: We had a huge drama situation when I picked her up from school and we were going home and she told me, “You know, tomorrow is Saint Nicholas dayI’m ”. And I was like, “Oh my God, no, I did not.” 

And she was like, “Yeah, so every kid in my class will receive some sweets and gifts tomorrow morning. So I should put up my shoes” because obviously they do that. And it was late and I was tired. And it was cold.

And I realised that probably I should have known, but I didn’t follow and I didn't know that it's tomorrow. 

And I was like, “Yeah but Ukrainian Nicholas, who is Micola, he will come later, on December 19th and she was like, “Yeah, but everyone else tomorrow will get something and I should wait until December 19th?”

And I'm like, “Well, yeah, because he's Ukrainian. He will come to all Ukrainian kids, so you should wait.” And I explained to her that like, Nicholas  was not prepared for tomorrow, so we'll just wait. 

But the next day to kind of support her, I took her to the store and we picked out some chocolates for her from St Nicholas as an apology from me.

I realise now that I need to follow better what traditions are here so that she doesn't miss out on all of that, because her friends now are getting that and she needs to be also a part of it.

Jakub: Look, it's very sad to not be able to come home for Christmas. What did cheer me up a little bit is that because there are so many Ukrainian families spread out all across Europe, they are also contributing to everyone else's Christmas. 

Nastya: Oh, that's interesting. 

Jakub: Them sharing a bit of Ukraine is also something that will bring Ukraine closer to Europe. And people will become more aware of it. The ties will grow out of that. 

Nastya: Yeah, I think this kind of cultural exchange that's happening is I guess one of the few positives that we somehow end up having out of this tragedy is that Alisa’s gonna go back to her school and she's gonna take in all of the German culture traditions, but she's also probably gonna share some of her own. 

She's probably gonna go and talk about how her Ukrainian Micola, you know our St. Nicholas, is coming at a different date because he's a bit late and you know, there's a war in Ukraine, so he's got a lot to do and you know, that kind of stuff.

But it's also interesting though, for me to notice how quickly the kids adapt. Like how quickly they adjust to this whole new reality and the parents having to navigate that as well. 

Because if I had to move to Berlin right now because of the war, I would not, it wouldn't affect me, you know, if I was given a present two weeks late, because I know what my traditions are and I follow them.

But for the kids who don't really have that sense of Ukrainian identity yet, they're a bit lost and they're just trying to take in whatever is around them and, and the parents have to navigate that. Now, with so many of the Ukrainian children being abroad in Europe and dealing with all of these new things, it's fascinating.

[Music]

And what about the diaspora? Because both of us know that they're always pretty extra with everything that they do, that's Ukrainian. Especially celebrations. 

Jakub: Well, yeah, the Ukrainian identity definitely burns strong. 

I got in touch with Andrea Chalupa, who you'll remember we spoke to in our very first episode about Ukrainian identity.

She's a Ukrainian-American journalist, author and podcast host, who grew up in Davis, California in a very Ukrainian American family. 

Andrea: Hello everyone. It's Andrea Chalupa, the writer and producer of Mr. Jones and co-host of the podcast Gas Lit Nation. I'm wishing you all, wherever you are in the world, a very happy holiday season of peace, love, joy and light.

I'm going to be celebrating with my loved ones, my family and friends. Not one, but two Christmases. I'll be doing the traditional 12 dishes that represent the 12 disciples of Christ. 

They are vegetarian dishes, starting with kutia, holubtsi (stuffed cabbage) and vareniki, and all of it, going down the list. And we're doing this on December 24th, Christmas Eve, and then again on January 6th, Orthodox Christmas Eve.

Why? Because that's just what we do. We're very lucky being a Ukrainian family and a mixed Ukrainian family. My dad's family is from West Ukraine. My mom's family is from Donbas and East Ukraine. So we've got a big mix of these Christmas traditions. And so both Christmases are celebrated mostly December 24th and 25th, but we always recognise Orthodox Christmas as a special time as well.

And we alway growing up would leave an empty plate at the table to acknowledge our ancestors. And that they're always going to be with us, and that when it's our turn to go home to the great big star in the sky, we will be with our descendants at the table with them every Christmas. And so it's a joyful reminder that life is eternal, love is eternal, and that we are all one big, beautiful, cosmic family, always and forever.

Thank you and happy holidays to you and yours. 

Jakub: So listening to Andrea actually reminded me a lot about the Polish diaspora that I kind of grew up in. 

So at least a couple of times a month or at least once a month, there'd be a gathering of the Polish diaspora, wherever we were, whether it was, Australia, France, the US, Germany.

And those would almost always be after mass, next to the church where you would have some Polish food and sort of the diaspora organisation and the church organisation, they were kind of almost inseparable. 

And people would come there and they would hold onto these traditions, and because of that you really had to hold them strong, right?

Nastya: Mm-hmm. 

Jakub: Because you were the carrier of your culture. And I think that's kind of what diaspora living meant for me. 

Nastya: I also think it's gratitude and the fact that people who don't actually live in Ukraine don't take these traditions for granted. 

Because they don't have the experience of just sitting in Kyiv at one of our amazing coffee shops listening to Ukrainian in the background, just like having the typical Ukrainian living in Ukraine experience.

So cherishing the traditions is all they have. Right? It's all the Ukrainianness that you can get. It's the only way how you can feel Ukrainian. 

Especially because many of them unfortunately don't end up speaking Ukrainian because it's quite difficult to sustain that language if you live in the US where nobody uses it, for example.

So, yeah, I think the diaspora is always so extra because this is their only avenue. 

Jakub: To sum up, we wanted to end on some notes of hope for the new year. 

Alyona: I just hope that 2023 will bring victory and Ukrainians from all over will be able to come back home and continue celebrating our holidays and pursuing our traditions and being with our families.

Ed: I think that every Ukrainian has one Christmas resolution right now: for Russians just to leave our country for good and stay out of Ukraine forever. 

I would like to remind everyone who is listening that the war is not over. That Ukrainians are still fighting, and while you celebrate Christmas and New Year and Hanukkah and everything, there will still be Ukrainian soldiers on the frontline fighting for the freedom of the whole Europe and dying for it.

So when you are buying your presents or getting the festive food and so on, continue talking about Ukraine, donating to Ukrainian organisations like Kyiv Pride and others because we are still here, we are still fighting and the freedom and the holidays in the whole of Europe, still depends on Ukraine.

Jakub: Thank you so much for listening to Power Lines. We'll see you next week for our regular episode where we'll be speaking to Andy Greenberg about cyber warfare. 

Anastasiia: Power Lines is a partnership between the Kyiv Independent and Message Heard. It was produced by Bea Duncan, Harry Stott, and Talia Augustidis. The executive producer is Sandra Ferrari. The theme music is by Tom Biddle and Alfie Godfrey.