A world-changing war: four years in Ukraine

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1:32Shashank Joshi:The Economist

1:39Shashank Joshi: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.

1:53Shashank Joshi:Today, on a grim anniversary, we look back on how war in one country has changed the world far beyond its borders.

2:10Shashank Joshi:Four years ago today, all across Ukraine, people woke up to this.

2:20In short order, millions of Ukrainians had fled, the biggest displacement of people in Europe since the Second World War.

2:28Shashank Joshi:Those who stayed, 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.

2:42Edward Carr:As all Ukrainians, I planned to return home, but my life was a little different.

3:12Shashank Joshi:more than tear apart Ukrainian families. It's ripped at the global security order, as American aid in particular has proved so fickle. War on Europe's doorstep has the EU working to secure its own defense like never before. And it's changed what that security looks like. Less tanks and jets, more drones and hybrid warfare. To talk through all of this, I'm joined in London by Edward Carr, our deputy editor, and Shishang Joshi, our defense editor, and Oliver Carroll, our Ukraine correspondent, who's in Kyiv. Thanks, all of you, for joining us today. Nice to be here.

3:48Edward Carr:Thanks, Jason. It's great to be here.

3:52Shashank Joshi: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?

4:04Oliver Carroll:I arrived in Kyiv a little over a week before the invasion. And at that point, I was still pretty unsure whether this would be a two-week assignment, but it turned out to be something quite different. By the 23rd, there were no doubts. I had a tip-off that it would be the next morning. And so I got up in the morning at 4 a.m. And then sure enough, the missiles started falling. It was a really surreal and really quite sad first month, seeing university lecturers preparing Molotov cocktails. I was one of the first journalists into Bucha to see all the atrocities there. And we've seen everything since.

4:37Oliver Carroll:The offensives, the counter-offensives, the war of attrition, and now we're down to this really uneasy quagmire. Seeing Ukraine hold the front lines heroically, but get progressively weaker in the rear. So, yeah, I mean, it's been heavy, I suppose you'd say, but also a massive privilege to see and witness and document it for The Economist.

4:56Shashank Joshi:And Edward Shishank, you've been involved deeply in the coverage that we have had of this war from London. And kind of in that four-year sweep, how do you think your view on the war has changed over that time? Edward, let's start with you. Well, I remember getting the phone call, what time was it, Shashank?

5:17Jason Palmer:I mean, very early in the morning. It was dawn. Yeah, it was a Thursday morning. And the first few months, it was very intense. We were covering this war around the clock. Meanwhile, the stakes to me seem just as high as they were. The stakes for Europe, the stakes obviously for Ukraine itself, but also the stakes for Russia and the consequences for Russia of what is, in my mind, a disastrous war for it and for Putin.

5:48Shashank Joshi:Shashank, I recall early discussions with you about whether or not the guesses of this being three days and over with were going to prove true or not.

5:58Edward Carr:I remember that. I also remember being woken up by Ed saying, it's happened, it's happening. And I remember ripping up what we'd written for that week and starting again. I was among those who underestimated the Ukrainians and didn't think they would be enduring to this degree. I thought Russian mass would eventually overpower them. And I was very, very wrong on that. But I reflect on the last several years and I think of the shockwaves this war has sent in so many directions. Stuff that is now almost at the back of our heads. the remarkable mutiny of Evgeny Prigozhin, the march on Moscow, North Korean troops fighting in Europe on a substantial scale to evict Ukraine from Kursk province.

6:35Edward Carr:And of course, for me, it's a sort of observer of nuclear strategy worldwide, that really dangerous moment in late 2022, when there was a real chance that Russia might use nuclear weapons if Ukraine were to break through at Kherson and cause massive damage to Russian forces. And it's, I think, a sign of how momentous this war has been, that each of those things, in some ways historical in itself, has been cast into some kind of subplot for the war as a whole.

7:05Jason Palmer:The other thing I think this war has been the stage on which the increasingly troubled transatlantic relationship has played out. America's support for Ukraine, the terms of that support, the feeling that Europe was or wasn't doing enough, then followed by Trump's skepticism about the war. All of that has been the backdrop for something we're still trying to comprehend now. It's still unclear exactly where that's going. But I think the relationship between the United States and Europe has changed fundamentally, and Ukraine has been the catalyst of that.

7:40Shashank Joshi:And Oliver, we've spoken over the past four years about how the war has played out, how things have looked on the ground. Taking all of that in, how do you think the war has changed Ukraine's people?

7:51Oliver Carroll:Well, I've been traveling to Ukraine since 1997. So I know the country, it was a tender, tolerant, relatively peaceful country, if you take aside what was happening in the East. And what Russia did to it, with all the things we've talked about, and the consequences of that have changed the nation and make some of the decisions that it now has to take about its future so much more difficult. Ukraine itself is physically smaller. The population is about a quarter smaller than it was at the start of the war. And there's been a shift in opinions. 98 % now have a very negative view of Russia, a shift towards European values.

8:27Oliver Carroll: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 promises to be just as dramatic and difficult as the war itself.

8:50Shashank Joshi:And Edward, what's your view on what things are like in Ukraine in the political sphere?

8:54Jason Palmer:Right at the beginning of the war, one of the things that happened was that this country that had been very chaotically and corruptly governed, cohered. It was an astonishing thing. It was a sort of self-organising 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 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.

9:38Jason Palmer: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's been going on a very, very long time now.

9:57Shashank Joshi:Shashank, a question for you, because you've been following the defense end of things. And in a sense, we've seen the nature of modern warfare change just in the course of this one conflict.

10:08Edward Carr: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.

10:51Edward Carr:And the result is effectively a static, sluggish battlefield in which neither Ukraine nor Russia can concentrate large numbers of forces because they will be seen and destroyed from the air. They have to rely on very small, dismounted infantry formations sneaking over the terrain. In addition to that, we've seen dramatically expanded use of small, cheap strike drones. We have seen the return of very old-fashioned ways of fighting, such as wire-guided missiles that would be familiar to 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.

11:35Edward Carr: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.

11:57Jason Palmer:The thing that strikes me about the way that the war's been fought is the somewhat different stakes here. This is a war of attrition, and that clearly favors Russia, but it's also a war where Ukraine is fighting its survival and Russia is fighting a war of choice. And so I think that somewhat offsets the question of mass and resources. And it isn't the first time that a big army has struggled against a much smaller army. And I think it's worth remembering that.

12:30Oliver Carroll:There's this unspoken assumption that Ukraine will continue as Europe's fortress. Certainly the Ukrainians feel this, a lot of them do at least, that they're fighting on to buy Europe, for example, time to prepare. And I think there's a danger that unless serious thought is given how to strengthen Ukraine, that means not just using the billions which are being earmarked for Ukraine to strengthen Europe's own industrial base. We're only actually buying time for Russia. Ukrainian resilience isn't inexhaustible. I was speaking to a soldier just the other day, I mean, he's been fighting since 2014, and he reckoned a third of his address book was no longer phoneable, and he couldn't bring himself to delete the names, he said.

13:13Jason Palmer:But what strikes me, Oli, is that Ukraine started this war in a weaker position, in a much weaker position. In fact, the calculation of Putin's generals was that they would be able to overrun the country. And then this period of mobile warfare ended after a few months, and since then it's been very static. and we've seen up front, you've seen in fact reported brilliantly up front on how much strain Ukraine has been under and through your reports we've got a very keen sense of how much suffering and effort's been required. We don't get the similar reports from the Russian front lines because journalists aren't allowed there.

13:54Jason Palmer:Very occasionally we get to read accounts of the slaughter and misery on the Russian front lines from conscripts who are deserting in record numbers, undertrained. The price for recruiting them is going up. And still Russia fails to take towns and advances. A recent report from CSIS said 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.

14:48Shashank Joshi:A question maybe for all of you on how this has shuffled alliances, the notion of rearmament, who backs whom, who can count on whom, and how that's changed over the course of the war. What's the sort of high-level view from your standpoint, Shashank?

15:00Edward Carr: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 defense 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.

15:57Edward Carr: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 at 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.

16:19Oliver Carroll:Okay, I have to tell you, I was just looking on eBay where I go for all kinds of things I love and there it was.

16:25Shashank Joshi:That hologram trading card. One of the rarest. The last one I needed for my set. Shiny like the...