A world-changing war: four years in Ukraine

0:03Shashank Joshi: The Economist.

0:10Shashank 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.

0:23Shashank Joshi: Today, on a grim anniversary, we look back on how war in one country has changed the world far beyond its borders.

0:41Shashank Joshi: Four years ago today, all across Ukraine, people woke up to this.

0:51In short order, millions of Ukrainians had fled, the biggest displacement of people in Europe since the Second World War.

0:58Shashank 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.

1:13Edward Carr: As all Ukrainians, I planned to return home, but my life was a little different.

1:43Shashank 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.

2:18Edward Carr: Thanks, Jason. It's great to be here.

2:22Shashank 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?

2:34Oliver Carroll: 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 to tip off that it would be the next morning. And so I got up in the morning at 4am. 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. and I was one of the first journalists into Butcher 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 quagmire.

3:13Oliver Carroll: 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.

3:27Shashank Joshi: And Edward Shishank, you've been involved deeply in the coverage that we have had of this war from London. 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.

3:42Jason Palmer: Well, I remember getting the phone call, what time was it, Shashank? 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.

4:19Shashank 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.

4:28Edward 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.

5:05Edward 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.

5:36Jason 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.

6:10Shashank 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?

6:21Oliver 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.

6:58Oliver 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.

7:21Shashank Joshi: And Edward, what's your view on what things are like in Ukraine in the political sphere?

7:25Jason 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.

8:09Jason 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.

8:27Shashank 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.

8:38Edward 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.

9:22Edward 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.

10:06Edward 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.

10:27Jason 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 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.

11:01Oliver Carroll: 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. 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 a third of his address book was no longer phoneable, and he couldn't bring himself to delete the names, he said.

11:44Jason 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.

12:25Jason Palmer: 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, 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 metres 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.

13:18Shashank 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?

13:31Edward 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.

14:27Edward 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 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.

14:47Shashank Joshi: Oliver mentioned earlier the notion that we've spoken about several times on the show, the day after, the plan for what comes after. What, at this point, is your view, what risks are there for the day after?

14:59Jason Palmer: One of the things that really worries me about the day after is that I don't see the European Union coming 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.

15:32Edward Carr: 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.

16:26Shashank Joshi: About the nature of that peace, 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?

16:35Jason Palmer: 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 Putin, I think, is that the underlying logic of the war he's been able to sort of put aside, well, I think he has to start facing up to the fact that this war has 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.

17:18Jason Palmer: One is territory. 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 Putin. So it's hard to imagine a set of security guarantees that satisfies both parties.

17:51Oliver Carroll: 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, 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.

18:22Oliver Carroll: Maybe 70 ,000, maybe 100 ,000 a month. Those kind of figures, it's very difficult to continue war. And there are some optimists inside the new defense ministry, for example, who think that kind of thing is possible if reforms are successful. But again, does 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.

18:55Edward Carr: The frustrating thing is, in the Trump administration, we hear the view that Ukraine is losing. Ukraine is feted for defeat. And that's why it must sign a deal now, however ropey 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.

19:31Edward Carr: and if Donald Trump decides to keep that up and keep 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 as 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 the risk of that scenario and I worry very much that that could still completely upturn many of the assumptions of our conversation.

20:02Shashank Joshi: Edward, Oliver, Shashank, thank you all very much for joining us.

20:06Edward Carr: Thank you, Jason.

20:07Shashank Joshi: Thank you.

20:08Edward Carr: Thanks, Jason.

20:11Shashank Joshi: 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, we'll be joined by our Russia editor, Arkady Ostrovsky, to take a close look at how the conflict manifests in Russians' day-to-day lives.

20:43Shashank Joshi: That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

20:55Thank you.