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.

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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.

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