Ukraine strikes Russian energy infrastructure

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. The CIA has been carrying out covert operations around the world for decades. How has it shaped how people feel about the U.S.? I'm Asma Khalid. And I'm Tristan Redman. And together we host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. As part of our series to mark the United States' 250th birthday, we're exploring the CIA's hidden history. Do you think the word of the United States will be trusted in years to come? For more, check out The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:41Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the World Service of the BBC, live from London. This is Owen Bennett-Jones. You may have heard in recent weeks that Ukraine has been increasingly successful in its use of drones to attack Russian energy infrastructure. infrastructure. Just last night, there was an attack on an oil refinery in St. Petersburg. But Kiev is also moving on another front. Russia's first annexation of Ukrainian land came in 2014 when it took over Crimea. And since then, no one has talked seriously about the Russian grip on Crimea being loosened. But Ukrainian drones have been making a mark in Crimea in recent weeks, hitting air defence facilities, bridges and energy-related targets.

1:27And these sustained attacks have really disrupted daily life there, as the BBC's James Beardsworth reports. On the single bridge that connects Crimea to the Russian mainland, traffic stretches for kilometres as cars try to leave the peninsula. This is an absolute record, says the motorist filming the queue. Over the past two months, Ukraine has made the illegally occupied peninsula a new theatre of the war, making life there increasingly intolerable.

2:08Drone and missile strikes on energy infrastructure and supply routes to the region have choked Crimea, leaving shortages of fuel, water and even groceries. 24-year-old Alexei, not his real name, is an IT worker from the western Crimean city of Yevpatoria. He told me more. Ukrainian drones are flying, rockets are flying like every week and the logistics have been damaged to the point where we have no petroleum right here and we have some shortages in various goods. The most serious of these shortages is fuel. In efforts to combat the situation, the regional authorities have declared a state of emergency across Crimea and stopped the sale of fuel at the pump.

2:58Nastya, again not her real name, is a resident of Sevastopol, the largest city in Crimea, where shortages have bitten the hardest. I've almost completely stopped using my car I only drive when it's really necessary We recently introduced a QR code system You are supposed to get a QR code through the messaging app And then use it to buy fuel The idea itself isn't bad But the implementation has been a complete failure Getting one of these QR codes Has turned into something like the Hunger Games We tried from lots of different funds. I still never got one. In a rare recognition of the crisis, President Vladimir Putin addressed the shortages last Sunday, calling them not critical, but pledging to boost fuel supplies by both land and sea.

3:57The attacks have left many Crimeans, who have been largely sheltered from Russia's 2022 invasion, increasingly frustrated. Irina, again, not her real name, is an archaeologist and also a Sevastopol resident. I think on the both sides, people are mostly angry. Whilst many blame Ukraine for their current situation, Irina says that in Crimea, it is a far more complicated picture. Most of us, we lived in Crimea our whole lives. therefore we lived in Ukraine. And a lot of us have relatives and friends and it just isn't that sort to blame the nations. Instead, many are beginning to point the finger at Moscow and what they say is its failure to protect Crimeans.

4:45Nastya told me more. It's hard not to blame the authorities. It feels like we should have prepared better. The situation had been getting more and more tense every month and every year. People here have always been optimistic. They believed things would work out and try to just live their lives. But now it feels like they are being worn down, little by little, over and over again. Though many I spoke to pledged to stick it out, hoping that the situation will improve. Some, like Alexei and his wife. believe a life in Crimea is no longer possible. We've already bought the tickets, so we're leaving in the first days of July.

5:33Where are you going? To Moscow. I can tolerate drones and rockets, but I can tolerate electricity problems. I work from home, and if there is no electricity, there is no work for me. I mean, you were born in Crimea, you've lived in Crimea all your life. How does it feel to leave your home? I feel angry, even furious, if I might say. I want to live here. We have a flat, we have life, friends, and now we must live because there is no more normal life in this town. And that was Alexei ending that report from James Beersworth saying he's off to Moscow, but what's he going to find there? The BBC's diplomatic correspondent is there, actually.

6:19James Landale happens to be there at the moment. So when someone like Alexei will come from Crimea, where obviously it's pretty bad, but when he gets to Moscow, what's he going to find? I think comparatively, a degree of normality, simply because the war in Moscow seems a lot further away than it does in Crimea. because in Crimea, it has been a place that has been subject to substantial amount of military activity from the Ukrainian side. And I think the shortages of fuel are greater there. However, he will see in Moscow that there's a shortage of fuel here, too. We've been spending a few days driving around Moscow, visiting petrol stations.

7:04And it's rare that you find a petrol station either that has no queue. The vast majority of them do have queues of varying lengths. and others where there is no queue, it means it's shut and there's no fuel there at all. So to that extent, he'll find that quite familiar. I was reading, very surprised to read, that the Russians are now taking refined oil or gas, gasoline, back from India. There's all that fuss about crude oil going into India. It's coming back now. Yeah, I mean, that is the great irony, and it's not been lost on people here, that Russia is one of the world's largest producers of crude oil.

7:43and yet such has been the extent of the Ukrainian targeting of Russian oil refineries that it is now having to, according to reports, get imports of refined oil, not just from India. There's been reports also that it's starting to come from Kazakhstan, which if you talk to a full-blooded Russian about the idea of getting humanitarian aid from Kazakhstan, You know, that is not something they're used to. Now, watching these Ukrainian drones going over the big Russian cities, you know, I mean, yeah, I'm not a military man, but they look big and they look flimsy and very slow. Why is it so hard for Russia to defend themselves against these drones?

8:30I mean, if you listen to the Russians and you follow what the Ministry of Defence says, they will say actually they are being pretty successful. They're shooting down the vast majority of them that are being sent in. However, some are clearly getting through. I think primarily, you know, the scale and the geography is the key factor. Russia has a huge area to defend. And if Ukraine, as seems to be the case, locates one area and floods it with drones, it's very, very hard, I think, for the Russians to defend. In Ukraine, the Ukrainians have a very well now well honed system of basically communications.

9:18In other words, identifying where the drones, the incoming drones are coming from and where they need to deploy those defences. And I think that's something that the Russians have yet to develop. I was reading one explanation for what's happening is that the Ukrainians are just, you know, they're smaller, they're less established as a military. They're just it's easier for them to adapt than it is for this big Russian military machine, as perhaps it would be for the big American military machine or British military machine. The Ukrainians have been able to adapt quite quickly to this new technology.

9:53Yes, they have. And, you know, necessity has been the mother of invention. there um however i think one thing we've seen during this war uh at least since the full-scale invasion in 2022 is that russia has started to learn how to learn and its military has adapted substantially and so for example uh where initially ukraine had a fairly uh you know obvious advantage when it came to the deployment of short-range first-person vision drones on the front line, the Russians have caught up there and are innovating and are learning and are adapting at pretty much the same speed as the Ukrainians because there, both sides are essentially learning on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis and adapting their technology in concert.

10:48I think elsewhere, when it comes to defending against long-range drones and longer-range missiles, that, I think, is harder. And I think it is much more a sense of geography and capacity because defending against fast missiles is much harder. Thanks very much indeed. That was James Landale in Moscow. You're listening to the World Service of the BBC.

11:21We're now well into the knockout stages of the FIFA World Cup. The round of 16 matches have started and France are through to the quarterfinals. They beat Paraguay 1-0. One of the tournament's co-hosts, Canada, are out. They lost 3-0 to Morocco. Lots of young Moroccans on the streets of London last night celebrating. And later today, it's Mexico, another co-host, playing England in Mexico. Andalusia Soloff is a Mexican journalist who's following all this. She's been telling us there is some risk of the weather causing problems. For whatever reason, they decided to just go ahead with the original kickoff time, which is 6 p.m.

12:01in Mexico City. And if there are storms, it will be delayed, but they hope that there will not be storms. People are insanely excited. Actually, when it kicked off, at first, people were not very excited. So there was really like not that much of a festive environment. But not only that, it was that people felt like there was a party in your house, but that you couldn't attend it because the tickets were so expensive. And people really felt like they were not being included in the World Cup. But what Mexico City and also Guadalajara and Monterrey, the three cities that are hosting the games, have done is put enormous screens all over the cities and these like big local fan fest.

12:40And that has really boosted the energy. So with the last week's win over Ecuador, there were actually 1 ,400 ,000 people that came out to celebrate in the streets. And we're actually celebrating until 9 a.m. The streets are still full of people celebrating. People are actually like friends of mine were just reaching out, being like, are you going to be at the celebration tomorrow? We want to come from all different states. The whole country is so excited. There was a statistic actually saying that it's believed that 90 percent of the Mexican population has been interacting with the World Cup, meaning that either they're watching the games or going to the games or going to these fan fest, all kinds of fun things going on the streets and people actually bringing out like traditional, like even Mexican bowls that are lit up with fireworks and dancing with them in the middle, like also just bringing traditional Mexican culture and integrating it into the World Cup celebration.

13:32Of course, we're going to win. And that was Mexican journalist Andalusia Soloff there. Germany's right-wing alternative for Germany, AFD, is holding its annual party conference this weekend in the eastern state of Turingia. And that is one of its electoral strongholds. Nationally, the party is polling in the high 20s. But as well as support, there is also strong opposition to the AFD. and some campaigners have been blocking roads to try to stop delegates from getting to the conference. Our correspondent Jessica Parker has this report.

14:13I'm making my way through a huge crowd of protesters. They're here because just up the road, the party Alternativa for Deutschland is holding its annual conference. I've been speaking to a couple of people who've shown up here. Stephanie and Felix, who live in the local area. We've stood on a road where people are doing a sit-in. There are obviously attempts as part of this demonstration today to stop AFD delegates getting to their conference. Is that all right to try and prevent people from going to a party conference? Is it all right to force migrants to go back to their countries with war? and bad situations happening in their home countries.

15:02It's our right to be here and the right to protest against a party that, in my opinion, is not democratic. I have several colleagues of mine that directly told me if the AfD gains power, they will leave Germany. They have concrete plans to go to Switzerland, to go to the Netherlands, to go anywhere else but to Germany. And I have to say I'm scared. There is a huge security operation surrounding this event. A helicopter just flew over our heads. I'm looking at a water cannon truck not being used at the moment. And I couldn't tell you how many police fans, police officers I've seen. We're just going to try and get an idea of the scale of the operation from police spokesperson Patrick Martin.

15:49We have pulled in forces from all other German states, several thousand officers. We have water cannon, helicopters, police horses. The situation is complex. Thousands of protesters here at the convention centre, but also protesters blocking roads in the vicinity and dozens of demonstrations in the city centre. Now, sections of the AFD are classed as right-wing extremist by domestic intelligence. The party He argues that's a political smear. It insists it's a democratic movement. Policy-wise, the AFD wants to restore ties with Putin's Russia, buy Russian gas again. And then there's the term remigration, a word that's widely understood to mean mass deportations of people with a migrant background, though the AFD's claimed it's illegal immigrants and foreign criminals that they have in their sights in this respect, not people with German citizenship.

16:48Nevertheless, it raised eyebrows when co-leader Alice Weidel openly used the term last year. This weekend, she took to the stage in Erfurt with this message for the party's opponents. To our political competitors who incite hatred against us and to those troublemakers outside the conference, I say, you can't break us, quite the opposite. it. We are getting stronger and bigger all the time.

17:20People who've showed up to protests here are obviously very against the AFD, even say they fear the party. But this is a party that's polling top in Germany and has a shot at taking power at a state level, a regional level, in elections this autumn. So the AFD is in a pretty buoyant mood. They feel like they're on the march.

17:53And that's a report from Jessica Parker in eastern Germany.

18:02A fair amount has been said in recent years about space junk, the tens of thousands of items floating around in space, a potential hazard to spacecraft. Well, now some of that material does come back to Earth, almost always burning up as it does so. But what's going on in Australia where mysterious metal balls have been washing up on beaches in the north of the country? No definitive explanation for this, but they're sort of shiny spheres and suggestions they are from space rockets. And we can speak now to Associate Professor Alice Gorman, a space archaeologist at Flinders University in Adelaide.

18:40And I think many will agree. I should probably first ask, what is a space archaeologist? What do you do? I look at the material culture, the objects and places that are to do with human movement into space and from an archaeological perspective to find out new things about human behavior. oh right so well this isn't really human behavior this is this is spheres coming down how big are they by the way i've been trying to work out how big they are about the size of a football or something it's a bit difficult to tell from the footage there's nothing for scale but they look to be uh possibly about um 40 to 50 centimeters wide in diameter right and they're very shiny and and what do you think they are they're definitely part of some kind of fuel system so they're called pressure spheres they often contain fuels um under high pressure and they are widely used in spacecraft however these particular ones as you say they're shiny and if they'd come back in through the atmosphere as space junk often does they should be a bit scorched and charred they shouldn't be quite so shiny.

19:55So it's possible that they come from a rocket that a stage that was discarded, the penultimate one, so they've fallen in from the high atmosphere, or they could even possibly come from some kind of maritime vessel. Maritime vessel? How do you mean? Lots of fuel systems use fuel under pressure in these sorts of tanks. Oh, I see. Okay. and because they don't look scorched or charred and they've washed up on a beach. So it's possible they're not from space. It makes a difference because it just occurred to me if these things which look very hard and quite heavy landed on you, that would be the end of you, right?

20:39Well, they wouldn't do you any good if they landed on you. But fortunately, it's extremely rare for space junk to land on people. However, we've had a massive increase in launches in the last five years. So the odds are getting shorter for space junk damaging people or property. Has it ever happened? In 1984, I think, a woman was walking in a park in the US and a piece of space junk, a little one, hit her on the shoulder and left a big bruise. and there have been a few occasions where some rocket parts which haven't come from orbit, which have come from the high atmosphere, have fallen on or near people's houses or their villages, but fortunately not at this stage.

21:30Okay. And just reading about this prior to talking to you, I sort of didn't understand this, but when stuff comes down from space, which it does quite often, it normally burns up before it gets to the Earth's surface, right? yeah normally everything burns up the bits that survive to the surface have are made of materials with a very high burning temperature like titanium alloys and it's exactly the kind of material that these spheres are made from they're so common they're actually called space balls and they're found all over the world and sometimes they're found years after they've actually landed on the Earth.

22:09Sounds like we all need to use umbrellas a little more, just in case, or maybe that would be a weak defence. Anyway, thank you very much. That's Associate Professor Alice Gorman in Adelaide on space balls or possibly marine craft balls that have been landing on Australian beaches.

22:41How did the United States build the largest soft power empire in the world with the help of some tiny metal objects? I'm Tristan Redmond, one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. To mark 250 years of the United States, we speak to Roman Mars of 99 % invisible. This soft power, this influence was an incredible invention. For more, listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

23:13The 250th anniversary of US independence comes at a time of American growth, most notably in the tech sector, but also of division with the culture wars as intense as ever. Now, traditionally, in the past, presidents of America have tended to stress American unity. But President Trump has been talking about division again, trialing new political attack lines about a communist threat. The communist system is the opposite of the American system and the communist system has never worked. Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America.

23:59We're not going to let it happen. Sounds like that's what the midterm campaigning will be all about. President Trump was speaking at a rally in Washington, D.C., which was delayed after thousands of spectators had to be evacuated from the National Mall due to fears of a thunderstorm. But he did finally get to the podium, and he had a more traditional message, too, about what it means to be American. Americans must never forget that we are a historic and heroic people with a heroic spirit and a heroic purpose on this beautiful earth of ours. We are made the courage and the fire and the flesh and the blood of the best and the bravest people this world has ever produced.

24:40We are the bravest and the best. Tonight we pledge allegiance to the flag they gave us and we say God bless the immortal patriots of 1776 and long live the cause of independence. So what about those who braved the weather? What did they think of the celebrations? I'm thrilled. It's our 250th Independence Day. I can't think of a better place to spend it than D.C. Being able to see all of the different monuments to the different accomplishments throughout our 250 years of history. Feeling great. I mean, I think the event and what it means to our country, it inspires you. You know, this is experiencing a little heat.

25:23It's a lot less than what a lot of people sacrifice to give us this freedom in this awesome country. So even though it's been hot and they've cancelled the parade and stuff like that, the excitement of being able to be in the presence of the president of the United States and hear him give celebration to our nation is just, it's very moving and it's powerful. I get chills even thinking about it. On Friday, President Trump visited Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, home to the famous presidential monument carved into the side of a mountain. And the BBC's North America editor, Sarah Smith, was in South Dakota and is speaking to some more Americans about the state of the country at the time of this 250th anniversary.

26:09So just how patriotic are Americans feeling? We stand beneath the monument of these heroes, a true group of unbelievable people. Donald Trump is relishing his role at the centre of America's 250th anniversary. And we rededicate ourselves to being a nation as big, bold, noble and as great as these American giants. Delivering the speech at Mount Rushmore, right underneath the carved faces of four of his greatest predecessors. These men could only have been made in the USA. America is setting up on Mount Rushmore a monument to Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

26:50Conceived as a tourist attraction, each president was intended to represent a chapter in America's story. 10 ,000 years from now. In 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt attended a dedication here. I think we can meditate and wonder whether our descendants, because I think they'll still be here, What they will think about us is that we have honestly striven to preserve for our descendants a decent land to live in and a decent form of government to operate under. When you get to Mount Rushmore, it is a genuinely impressive sight. These enormous, imposing faces gazing out of the granite. It is pretty busy, no surprise really, on the 4th of July weekend.

27:33but you can see groups gazing up and debating whether you could, whether you should add another face to the mountain and whether Donald Trump should be up there. Let's see where we can put him. What do you think? To the left or to the right? The biggest in the front. There you go. President Trump has shared AI-generated images online that show his face carved into the monument, provoking outrage among his critics, amusement from his fans. It wouldn't hurt me one bit. I think he deserves to be up there. I think what exists today is appropriate. and I don't feel like it should be changed. It does, admittedly, on the right-hand side of Abraham Lincoln, look like there is space where you could put in one more face, but experts say it wouldn't be technically possible.

28:13There just isn't enough granite left. You could seriously damage the existing faces because there's a really deep fissure running through the rock. That's disappointing news for Tim Burke and Terry Davis, who rode over 800 miles on their motorbikes from Idaho to be here for the same weekend as President Trump's visit. I'm 72 years old, and I have not been this passionate about any other president until he took the reins of this country. 20, 30 years from now, the historians will say that he's been one of the greatest presidents in the history of our nation. Absolutely. That's what the majority of America believes.