A world-changing war: four years in Ukraine

This Monday.com ad was created by a team of people and AI agents. The agents wrote the copy and managed the timelines, while our human creative director made sure it all made sense. Easy. Create your own AI agent today on Monday.com. This intelligence podcast is sponsored by Backmarket, the leading global marketplace for refurbished tech. When the kids need phones, laptops, or tablets for school, buying refurbished tech makes sense for families trying to save money without sacrificing quality. At Backmarket, tech costs up to 50% less compared to new. All devices have been professionally refurbished and come with a one-year warranty and 30-day return policy. Start saving money. Visit backmarket.com or the Backmarket app to shop now. The Economist. Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Today, on a grim anniversary, we look back on how war in one country has changed the world far beyond its borders.

Four years ago today, all across Ukraine, people woke up to this. In short order, millions of Ukrainians had fled, the biggest displacement of people in Europe since the Second World War. Those who stayed and those who have since returned are now facing the harshest winter since the war began, often and unpredictably without water or power or heat. Many Ukrainians, of course, have made new lives elsewhere. Eriene Kusnir fled to Istanbul in 2022 and says she always planned to return to her eastern home in Kharkiv. Four years later, she says life has turned out differently. Her daughter stayed in Ukraine. She says she's proud of that, that it's important that young people stay. because they are the future. The war has done far more than tear apart Ukrainian families. It's ripped at the global security order as American aid in particular has proved so fickle. War on Europe's doorstep has the EU working to secure its own defense like never before. And it's changed what that security looks like. Less tanks and jets, more drones in hybrid warfare. To talk through all of this, I'm joined in London by Edward Carr, our deputy editor, and Shishong Joshi, our defence editor, and Oliver Carroll, our Ukraine correspondent who's in Kiev. Thanks all of you for joining us today. Nice to be here. Thanks, Jason. It's great to be here. Now, Oliver, let's start with you on this fourth anniversary of the start of the war. You've been reporting from Ukraine since that very first day. I remember that day. What's it been like, in short, to witness the war unfold? I arrived in Kiev a little over a week before the invasion, and at that point I was still pretty unsure whether this would be a two-week assignment, but it turned out to be something quite different. By the 23rd, there were no doubts. I had a tip off that it would be the next morning, and so I got up in the morning at 4 a.m. and then, sure enough, the missiles started falling. It was a really surreal and really quite sad first month, seeing university lectures preparing Molotov cocktails, and I was one of the first journalists into Boucher. to see all the atrocities there. And we've seen everything since the offensives, the counter-offensives, the war of attrition, and now we're down to this really uneasy quagmine. Seeing Ukraine hold the front lines heroically, but get progressively weaker in the rear. So, yeah, I mean, it's been heavy, I suppose you'd say, but also a massive privilege to see and witness and document it for the economist. And Edward Shishonk, you've been involved deeply in the coverage that we have had of this war from London. In that four-year sweep, how do you think your view on the war has changed over that time? Edward, let's start with you. Well, I remember getting the phone call.

relatively peaceful country, if you take aside what was happening in the East. And what Russia did to it with all the things we've talked about, and the consequences of that have changed the nation and make some of the decisions that it now has to take about its future so much more difficult. Ukraine itself is physically smaller. The population is about a quarter smaller than it was at the start of the war. And there's been a shift in opinions. 98% now have a very negative view of Russia. shift towards European values. But you're also seeing a fragmentation. The pure unity of that first year of war is definitely fractured. And society is now split into different camps, those who stayed, those who left, those who fought, those who didn't. And these divisions, I think, will be heavily played upon the minute the war ends if it does. I think the day after promise is to be just as dramatic and difficult as the war itself. And Edward, what's your view on what things are like in Ukraine in the political sphere? Right at the beginning of the war, one of the things that happened was that this country that had been very chaotically and corruptly governed. It was an astonishing thing. It was a sort of self-organizing principle that Ukrainians found within themselves the ability to resist a much larger country and surprised the world when it did it. And as the war has continued, perhaps understandably kind of normal politics has reasserted itself. And so Volodymyr Zelensky's incredible popularity has been eroded. There have been instances of corruption, in particular a very big instance, with the arrest of one official recently and another official fleeing the country. All of that is kind of what you'd expect, I think. It hasn't stopped Ukraine being able to fight. It hasn't stopped there being a resistance to Russia, but there's fatigue, and this war has been going on a very, very long time now. Shishonka, a question for you because you've been following the defense end of things. And in a sense, we've seen the nature of modern warfare change just in the course of this one conflict. We have, just before the war began, I wrote a technology quarterly which was on the subject of hiding versus finding on the battlefield. And the argument was essentially the technologies of sensors, so drones, satellite, things like that, combined with cheap precision strike weapons, were tilting the battlefield away from the people trying to hide on the ground. and towards the finders and you had a more lethal battlefield. What we've seen in Ukraine is the extreme validation of that concept. We have moved much more in the direction of what you would call a transparent battlefield, one in which everything is seen from above, one in which it is very, very dangerous to be moving or exposed on the ground. And the result is...

effectively a static, sluggish battlefield in which neither Ukraine nor Russia can concentrate large numbers of forces because they will be seen and destroyed from the air. They have to rely on very small, dismounted infantry formation sneaking over the terrain. In addition to that, we've seen dramatically expanded use of small, cheap strike drones. We have seen the return of very old-fashioned. ways of fighting, such as wire-guided missiles that would be familiar to an Egyptian infantryman from the 1970s fighting against Israel. We've also, I think, in a very big way, seen the central role played by... commercial actors in warfare. And I think the most obvious example of this is the provision of satellite communications by Starlink, both to Ukraine and more recently some degree to Russia. And the role of these commercial entities who are not necessarily beholden to states, who have their own interests, I think that's been a real wake-up call for Western militaries as well, who have realized this is the way that we might also have to fight. The thing that strikes me about the way that the war's been fought is the somewhat different stakes here. This is a war of attrition. And that clearly favours Russia. But it's also a war where Ukraine is fighting its survival and Russia is fighting a war of choice. And so I think that somewhat offsets the question of mass and resources. And it isn't the first time that a big army has struggled against a much smaller army. And I think it's worth remembering that. There's this unspoken assumption that Ukraine will... continue as Europe's fortress, certainly Ukrainians feel this, a lot of them do at least, that they're fighting on to buy Europe, for example, time to prepare. And I think there's a danger that unless serious thought is given how to strengthen Ukraine, that means not just using the billions which are being earmarked for Ukraine to strengthen Europe's own industrial base. We're only actually buying time for Russia. The Ukrainian resilience isn't inexhaustible. I was speaking to a soldier just the other day. And he's been fighting since 2014. And he reckoned the third of his address book was no longer phonable. And he couldn't bring himself to delete the names he said. But what strikes me, Oli, is that Ukraine... started this war in a weaker position, in a much weaker position. In fact, the calculation of Vladimir Putin's generals was that they would be able to overrun the country. And then this period of mobile warfare ended after a few months, and since then it's been very static. And we've seen up front, you've seen, in fact, reported brilliantly upfront on how much strain Ukraine has been under.

And through your reports, we've got a very keen sense of how much suffering and efforts been required. We don't get the similar reports from the Russian front lines because journalists aren't allowed there. Very occasionally, we get to read counts of the slaughter and misery on the Russian front lines from conscripts who are deserting in record numbers, under-trained, the price for recruiting them is going up. And still, Russia fails to take... towns and advances a recent report from CSISED only up to like 70 meters a day in the Donetsk front, which is slower than the Battle of the Somme. So I don't want to minimize in any sense the suffering on the Ukraine side and the exhaustion in Ukraine. But I am struck by the repeated failure of Russia to be able to stage large advances. And I guess the question for this coming year of war is whether Russia's ability to mobilize manpower and machinery is likely to increase, stay the same, or even decrease. A question maybe for all of you on how this is shuffled alliances, the notion of rearmament who backs whom, who can count on whom, and how that's changed over the course of the war. What's the sort of high-level view from your standpoint, Shishonk? The rearmament is real. It's very, very real. And to give you a sense of that, even since the beginning of the full scale invasion, European defence spending has gone up by 50%. That's an absolutely enormous sum of money. And it's resulted in massive changes. Equipment procurement has gone up 40% year on year in Europe. Defense R&D has gone through the roof. Ammunition production has multiplied sixfold since the pre-war level in Europe, if you look at shells. So this is... incredibly real rearmament. But on the other side, what we also have seen, and this is very important, is a Russian, North Korean, Iranian Chinese defense industrial complex to the point where without regular supplies of Chinese components of North Korean ammunition, of Iranian drone designs earlier in the conflict, Russia would not have been able to maintain itself in this. conflict. And indeed, even if today China were to shut the supplies off of all vital components, the Russian defense industry would grind to a halt. So one really significant outcome of the last several years of conflict has, I think, been this deep coupling of this Sino-Russian defense industry in a way that will have consequences for years to come. This Economist podcast is sponsored by Bill, the intelligent finance platform that helps businesses and accounting firms scale with proven results. With AI-powered automation, Bill isn't just moving money. They're simplifying financial operations for nearly half a million customers. Bill has securely processed over a trillion dollars in transactions. That's proven infrastructure. Ready to talk with an expert? Visit bill.com slash proven and get a $150 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.com slash proven. Terms and conditions apply. See offer page for details.

Granger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building. You're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, filters ready to clog, H-back on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Granger. For quality products, easy reordering, and 24-7 support. Call 1-800 Granger, click Granger. Or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done. Oliver mentioned earlier the notion that we've spoken about several times on the show, the day after, the plan for what comes after. At this point is your view, what risks are there for the day after? One of the things that really worries me about the day after is that I don't see the European Union. becoming good on its promise to admit Ukraine. And I also think, given the fiscal pressure of most of Europe, that the chances of Europe being insufficiently generous to Ukraine when the fighting stops are pretty high. So the scene is set for some kind of betrayal narrative in Ukraine. Ukraine having fought the war, partly for Europe's behalf, and then Europe not really coming to help afterwards. And that's potentially very, very dangerous. I think much more attention has gone to how does Ukraine secure itself, you know, stand on its own two feet in a post-war scenario. What we have seen in recent years is Ukraine power ahead on developing long-range drones, long-range cruise missiles of a kind that many NATO countries simply don't possess themselves. And these are not hypothetical weapons. These are weapons that are already... striking deep inside Russia, inflicting damage on Russian oil refineries, energy supplies, causing real disruption. And I think if we think about Ukraine as a post-war state standing up for its own security, the Ukrainian missile force with ever longer reach into Russia, with ever more accurate missiles, is going to be one absolutely pivotal element of that deterrent effort that Ukraine will need to stabilize a long-term peace with Russia. About the nature of that piece, I'd like to ask on this anniversary, do you see an end to this? Will we be sitting here talking about another anniversary or one four years from now? Well, I think there are a number of problems about imagining a real peace here. Part of this is for Vladimir Putin. Peace is difficult for him. Reallocating resources from his war economy to a peace economy is very difficult and likely to cause a recession. Another thing is that the returning soldiers are not coming back as heroes. And the other thing for Vladimir Putin, I think, is that the underlying logic of the war, he's been able to sort of put aside, well, I think it has to start facing up to the fact that this wars cost a lot in blood and in treasure and has accomplished very little. But from the point of view of the battlefield, too, it's difficult to see how this works because of two outstanding issues. One is territory. Vladimir Putin... wants to be able to say that he successfully got the territories that he said he had to, and that means being given ground that he couldn't take through force of arms. Why should Ukraine give up this ground? It's vital for the defense of Ukraine and to stop further advances. The other thing is security guarantees.

The better the security guarantees, the more plausible they are for Ukraine, the less acceptable they are to Vladimir Putin. So it's hard to imagine a set of security guarantees that satisfies both parties. Every day that the war is going on in Ukraine, Ukraine is losing a little bit because the war is going on in Ukraine. It's really not going on in Russia so much. And there is an argument that sooner or later Vladimir Putin may decide that this is the right time to take the chance to bank some of the things he's being offered from the Americans. But if you speak to those who are on, you might say, the pro-continuation camp, the people who believe that reforms in Ukraine can actually lead to massive attritional rates. So not at the 30,000 we're talking at the moment, but 50,000 is the target by summer, maybe 70, maybe 100,000 a month. Those kind of figures are very difficult to continue war. And there are some optimists inside the new Defence Ministry, for example, who think that kind of thing is possible if reforms are successful. But again, does Vladimir Putin understand what's coming down the line? Probably not. This is a man who was told in 2022 there would be very little Ukrainian resistance. I think ultimately, we're looking for real pressure to be put on Russia from the Americans. And what we've seen so far is it's not really coming. The frustrating thing is, in the Trump administration, we hear the view that Ukraine is losing. Ukraine is fated for defeat, and that's why it must sign a deal now, however ropy that deal is. But the U.S. is approaching this as if it is some disinterested, detached observer of the conflict, when in fact it's the pivotal player here, still. U.S. power is still the central... factor in much of this, both in terms of its ability to pressure Russia, but on the flip side, in its ability to give Ukraine the arms, the ammunition, the technology that it needs, whether that is intelligence, whether that is shells, whether that's long-range rockets. And if Donald Trump decides to keep that up and keeps selling some of this to Europe, Ukraine can... stay in this, even if things are tough, if he chooses to say, I want a deal before the midterms that I can claim this my own and go towards my Nobel Peace Prize campaign and I'm willing to cut Ukraine off at the knees. We are not out of the woods yet in terms of risk of that scenario. And I worry very much that that could still completely upturn many of the assumptions of our conversation. Edward, Oliver Shishong, thank you all very much for joining us. Thank you, Jason. Thanks, Jason. What has remained largely hidden from view over these four years is what's going on inside Russia, a country at war whose citizens increasingly wish it wasn't. Tomorrow will be joined by our Russia editor, Arkady Ostrovsky, to take a close look at how the conflict manifests in Russian's day-to-day lives.

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