Kicking Kyiv: Trump’s doubtful deals

0:00Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like, and that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0, depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments.

0:37You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. This message comes from Betterment.

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2:18The Economist

2:24Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor.

2:34Today on the show, India tries to crush the Gen Z protests And why everyone, apart from possibly me, should try singing

2:49But first

3:01Last night, attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure reportedly left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity. That followed a weekend of Russian strikes on power stations across the country. Blasting energy facilities is not new. Recently, Ukraine has been fighting back, hitting oil refineries in Russia. We have to respond in any way. With their attacks on our energy, we have to respond on their energy. Amid the maelstrom, Donald Trump claims to have brokered deals to import Russian diesel and an energy ceasefire. But the evidence on the ground doesn't exactly point that way. And this morning, a new twist.

3:48Very disturbing news out of Ukraine. The Ukrainians think that the military-grade Starlink satellite system, which they use to basically, their whole battlefield communications depends on this, that SpaceX has limited Ukraine's access to this system. Edward Carr is The Economist's deputy editor. They'll only work on terminals that are moving under 100 miles an hour. That means ground stuff is all fine. But for their drone operations, including their deep strike drone operations and their battlefield kamikaze drone operations, these are now restricted. And SpaceX has not confirmed this. Starlink has not confirmed this.

4:30But the Ukrainians believe that this is deliberate and it is a really severe blow to their ability to fight. And Ed, that comes on top of an already extraordinary few days for Ukraine. It's been an amazing few days. It started with Trump surprising everybody by announcing a deal for Russia to export. diesel and lifting sanctions to allow that. It followed very quickly after Ukraine's President Vladimir Zelensky reacted angrily, understandably, with Trump saying that actually Ukraine needed a new president and then saying completely unilaterally that there was going to be an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.

5:10Meanwhile, Russia continued to hit lots of targets inside Ukraine, including energy infrastructure. And then what emerged were threats, interpreted as threats, I think, by Ukraine of the withholding of American intelligence and the supply of arms paid for by Europe. It's moving very quickly, lots of uncertainty, lots of bitterness and unhappiness. You put these all together, this is a real power play against Ukraine. And lots to unpack there. Let's start with the supposed diesel deal then. What's Trump trying to do? Well, formally, Russia has agreed to release fuel this month, next month, and going up to 1 million tonnes a month in subsequent months.

5:54There are a number of problems with the idea that this deal is going to cause diesel prices to fall a lot. One is it's not clear that Russia can produce all the diesel it's promised. Its refineries have been damaged after all. Second is that it probably is exporting as much as it can illicitly. So for it to export more requires extra capacity. And the third is that even if it exports the amounts it's promised, which goes up to a million tons a month. That's less than 1 % of global demand. So that's really not going to have a big effect on the price. So why does Donald Trump want this? I think the answer is very clearly electoral.

6:31A big issue in the lead up to the midterm elections in three weeks time is the price of diesel well above$6 a gallon, doing a lot of damage, particularly in some of the swing states, farming states. So Trump wants to do two things, I think. Once he wants the headline to say, I'm really doing something about this, but also more subtly and I think sort of unpleasantly, he wants to blame high diesel prices on Ukraine, taking the attention away from what most analysts think is a bigger reason for the elevated prices, which is the war in Iran, which has also shut in lots of refining capacity. So it's a big electoral gambit by Trump.

7:14And I don't think it's going to work in terms of the prices. It's not even really clear that the politics is going to work particularly well for him because it's so cheap. He's selling himself so cheap on this. But I think that's why it's happened. And where does the energy ceasefire fit into that? Well, what it does is it's the mechanism by which he says to Ukraine, you've got to stop hitting Russian refineries. And in return, Russia won't hit your refineries. It sounds like a peaceful move by a president who's trying to bring order. It really is incredibly one sided. Russia has lots of refineries, they're important to its economy.

7:54Ukraine has one refinery, which Russia's already struck. So it's completely asymmetrical. So Putin is very much the winner in this? Putin is enormously the winner. If to the extent that he raises extra money by selling extra fuel, which I don't think is great, but to the extent he does, it's worth something. It also helps him when he does export against sanctions to other countries, any energy at all, it can point to America and say, well, America's lifted sanctions. And America's doing this, possibly illegally, actually, so there maybe have to be some law changes at home in America, that's unclear at the moment, but certainly against the spirit of a recently passed act in memory of Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina who died, which was completely designed to put more pressure on Russia over sanctions.

8:42So it's against the spirit of that. So that's a kind of propaganda victory for Putin. And I think there's a couple of other things. One is actually the site inside Russia of Ukraine striking refineries in Moscow, around Moscow and elsewhere, was really taking the war home to Russians. And they're generally trying to shut it out of their consciousness. So that's uncomfortable for Putin. And to the extent that Ukraine feels bound to observe the moratorium on striking Russian refineries, it helps Russia. So there are just lots of gains for Putin. And where does that leave the already rocky relationship between Zelensky and Trump?

9:22Pretty bad. Not as right back to the levels that we saw in that infamous encounter in the Oval Office that was still shocks today, but pretty bad. I think Ukraine has learned something. You can't just rebuff Trump completely. Neither should you roll over completely. You need to do something somewhere in the middle, play for time, hope that he moves on, hope that after the midterms that the pressure disappears on this issue. And so what Zelensky is doing quite cannily is saying, look, we are not hitting refineries. That's two days now. But every time Russia strikes anything inside Ukraine, they draw attention to how unfair this is.

10:05Meanwhile, I think that Ukraine should be looking at other targets. So for instance, it has hit some data centers. It has been hitting distribution centers of Russia's equivalent of Amazon. It should go after those strikes too, so that that blunts, I think, the gains to Putin. But it's very, very uncomfortable. And it's a reminder yet again, of how transactional Donald Trump is and how willing he is to dump his friends and how little he cares about that. And also a strange and sneaking admiration for Vladimir Putin. I think one thing we heard yesterday from a speculation from a Russian source is that Putin is dangling in front of Donald Trump the prospect of being able to do something with Iran.

10:51It's astonishing, isn't it, that Russia has been supplying Iran with targeting data, which is directly against America's interests. And yet Putin is using that, the speculation is from this Russian source. It's using that to say, look, we may be able to lean on Iran in order to get some sort of deal or something even before the midterms, which really would be a prize for Donald Trump. So Putin is playing Trump. Trump wants things. And Trump is very comfortable with the idea that you do deals among these great leaders and that everyone else has to live with it. And what about weapons and intelligence sharing?

11:28Yes. I mean, Ukraine depends a lot less on the United States than it once did. at the beginning of the war for weapons and intelligence, but it's still very, very important. On weapons, in theory, the US should be selling interceptors to help defend Ukrainian cities against this onslaught that Vladimir Putin is raining down. There aren't very many of those left. There's so many used up in the war against Iran. However, there are other things that America supplies that are really important. For instance, if you haven't got interceptors, you need to rely on jets to shoot down some of these missiles.

12:01And the munitions for those jets are supplied by the United States. Big problem if the Ukrainians can't buy it. On intelligence, there are commercial satellites available, which can give Ukraine some visibility, but it's really helpful for targeting things like headquarters, munitions dumps behind Russian front lines, which is kind of very important for the US. And on top of that comes this news that there is this limitation of the Ukrainians' ability to use Starlink, which in effect takes out their control of fast-moving drones. A really big blow to Ukraine's ability to conduct the war. Ed, you said at the beginning this was an electoral gambit.

12:46What effect will it have on the midterms? it's a really interesting question rosie diesel prices do count they are an irritant and if they fall or if he appears to be trying to do something to lower them that may get him some credit i think there is a risk here which is that it draws attention to the diesel price and it also draws attention to his charminess with putin which doesn't go down particularly well in polling so I think the gain is probably pretty small and there is a some risk of it doing him harm and I think that makes the fact that he's willing to put so much at risk in Ukraine for that all the more shocking really.

13:32Ed thank you very much. Thanks Rezi.

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14:23Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like, and that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0, depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments.

15:00You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.

15:54Last weekend, my hometown of Delhi felt like a city under siege. Kira Huyu is our Asia correspondent. You had these Orwellian loudspeakers that were blasting threats at protesters, but for much of Delhi, there were just no protesters inside.

16:21The borders were sealed off. You couldn't come in on trains. You got checked at the border in your car. Huge parts of central Delhi had their internet completely shut off for 24 hours. This was all part of one of the most total and brutal crackdowns on peaceful protest in Delhi in years and years.

16:50As part of that crackdown, I spend hours watching scattered protests emerge like flash mobs, only for police officers with sticks to slap them down in this twisted urban game of whack-a-mole.

17:11What's your name? Mohawk. And how old are you? I'm 22. Okay, and why are you here? Why? Because there is something seriously going wrong in this country and I want to have a say because I'm a citizen, right? As we were doing the interviews, Moha got a call from his friend saying that all his other friends had been detained. She said she's hurt, she got beaten up by a stick. Her friends are detained, she's detained. But young Indians are angry and they're on the streets. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his 12 years of rule, has never experienced anything like this before. Kira, explain to us what's really going on here.

17:59These were supporters for the Cockroach Party formed earlier this year. Remind us who they are and what they actually want. So the Cockroach Janta Party emerged in response to some really ill-advised comments by the Chief Justice of India calling some unemployed youngsters who create trouble for the state cockroaches. And a graduate student in the States from India called Abhijit Dipke simply posted a tweet that said, what if all cockroaches came together? And that tweet went viral and very quickly moved into a satirical online movement that then strangely quickly started going offline. And in July, the Cockroach Janta Party, which satirically takes its name off Modi's party, the party at Janta Party, staged one of the biggest protests that Delhi had seen in years.

18:54Protesting exam paper leaks, a corrupt education system and bad job prospects for young Indians. And to everyone's surprise, including my own, that protest actually managed to get the education minister to resign. So they actually got what they wanted. What do they cross about this time? This time they want someone else to resign. And that's the chief election commissioner of India, Gyanesh Kumar, who's been breaking protocol in his role as chief of what is supposed to be India's independent democracy watchdog. But critics, including the cockroaches, but also the legacy opposition parties are convinced that he is spearheading forms of vote rigging, essentially, in what is supposed to be the world's largest democracy.

19:44A law change in 2023 made it so that the prime minister gets to essentially handpick his own chief election commissioner. And last year, that election commission put most of India through a bureaucratic exercise called a special intensive revision of voter lists. And now there are mounting allegations that the election chief has disenfranchised voters in ways that might basically entrench the BJP's electoral edge for years to come. These allegations have all been denied by the government, by the BJP, and by the election commission, although Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spoken on none of these issues.

20:23And you spoke to the cockroach party leader recently, didn't you? Yeah, that's right. I spoke again with Abhijit Dipke, who is the founder of the Cockroach Gentle Party. Narendra Modi and Amit Shah has turned Delhi into a war zone where they have called in forces from across India and deployed in Delhi. And in a way, they are waging a war on their own countrymen to save one Gyanesh Kumar. What makes Gyanesh Kumar so indispensable for Narendra Modi that he's willing to wage a war on his own countrymen? Abhijit speaks with such conviction and clarity now, but he's not, in fact, a practiced politician.

21:02He's now held up to the standards of every legacy politician who's had decades of PR training. And here he was on October 10th, trying to land in a plane with two of his co-leaders back at Delhi Airport so that they could jointly lead the protest. The moment that the plane landed, police entered the plane, detained Deepke and his co-leaders, separated them and brought them each to different undisclosed locations where they would stay for the next 24 hours without access to their phones while the protests were going on in Central Delhi, leaderless. Are the protests still going on now? Basically what happened last Saturday is that virtually everyone who was properly identified as a protester got detained.

22:00And so those protests were very sporadic. But by Monday, the Supreme Court had ordered the government and the police to rein it in a little. And what you had was a mass rally of tens of thousands of protesters that was led by India's legacy opposition parties.

22:28They marched towards the Supreme Court. And now both those legacy opposition parties, Niha Bora, the communist student leader, and the cockroaches have sworn to continue their protest until Mr. Kumara resigns. So where is all this going to end? The protesters aren't going anywhere. Or if they're going somewhere, they are simply retreating so that they can become better organized and start becoming a clearer political entity. So when I touched base with Mohawk again, he was talking to me about how he originally got into protests. And it was only in July with the Cockroach Janta Party. He'd never been to a protest before.

23:10He'd literally just been doing one of these mindless midnight scrolls on Instagram that we're all so familiar with. And he'd stumbled upon some Cockroach Janta Party content. And I could not sleep because of everything that was going on in the country. Almost accidentally, he ended up at these protests in July where the cops ended up beating him with a stick. That enraged me from inside that. How can they beat me and my friends for literally no reason? And that really earned the government a committed critic of this formerly apolitical young man. And he is now saying, I got detained. Never mind.

23:48I actually went back the next day and then went back the following day. And it seems to me from my conversations with increasingly enraged youngsters across Delhi, often as they were literally being wheeled off in police vans and I was shouting questions behind them, that Mohawk is not unique. There is a lot of very angry young Indians now. And the impression I get from Abhijit is that the cockroaches aren't going anywhere either. We will keep going back on the streets no matter how many times they arrest us, no matter how many times they jail us. Every time they jail us, we will come back again more strongly and we are not going to back off because cockroaches never die.

24:32Kira, thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me.

24:46Joel, rather than asking you what you had for breakfast for the sound check could you sing something for me please? Yeah

24:56Do you mind if I use that for the start please? Yes, absolutely Absolutely

25:12Singing has provided a soundtrack to human history. It's central to human life. Joel Budd is The Economist's social affairs editor. Songs tell people about their past and about their values. It's not completely clear, but it seems that ancient epics, which placed societies in mythic time, were usually sung or chanted. Virgil's Aeneid, in the most common translation, begins, I sing of arms and the man. It doesn't begin, I speak of arms and the man.

25:51Singing has, for a long time, been a way to bind ideological communities together. So the early Protestants sang hymns.

26:06Pro-democracy demonstrators in Belarus and Estonia have sung folk songs. And singing seems to help people at all stages of life. Children, time to run along to bed now. Oh, can't we have just one more song? Songs seem to hold babies' attention and prevent them from crying longer than speech does.

26:35It also seems to help parents. One British study found that singing groups were better than playgroups at alleviating really severe postnatal depression.

26:55Many people derive pleasure from singing in choirs and other groups. about one and a half million Germans belong to either church choirs or choirs that are affiliated with the main singing associations. Many more Germans sing in more casual groups.

27:20In a new book, Sing, Sasha Langton-Gilks, a singer and a singing teacher, argues that almost everyone can sing and almost everyone should sing. But that raises a question. If singing is so enjoyable and so beneficial, why don't we do it more as a society?

27:49One answer to why we don't sing more, I think, is that it's really very, very difficult to sing well. Good technique has to be learned. Bad habits have to be continually thrown out. Many, many things can ruin a voice, at least temporarily. Germs ruin it. Women are affected by the hormone progesterone, which dries the vocal cords. And the main thing that affects voice is ageing.

28:18There are also many social difficulties associated with singing. some people are perfectly happy to sing solo in front of strangers many people, perhaps most people, would find that as scary as being asked to take their clothes off I think it probably doesn't help that really wonderful singers are so within reach we can tap our phones and we can bring up a really fantastic singer somebody like Caroline Polachek, the pop singer

28:59Sasha Langton-Gilks argues that group singing is enjoyable even if it's done by people who aren't fantastic singers and that it brings people together and there is some evidence for this it does seem that singing together with other people makes you feel close to them the truth is it can also be pretty infuriating and quite disheartening I've sung in half a dozen choirs in my life and I've sung in choirs where some people will ostentatiously turn away or even stick a finger in their ear if you sing a wrong note in order to not be distracted by your bad singing. This is pretty offensive. If it's true that singing is an essential part of life, it's not a surprise that life intrudes upon singing.

29:49The strains of ordinary existence can wreck people's voices and throw singing groups into disharmony.

30:15That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

30:40This message comes from Betterment. Dan Egan, VP of Behavioral Finance and Investing, explains how Betterment takes the time-consuming work out of smart investing. I grew up learning about finance and investing myself and realizing that I needed to reinvest dividends and rebalance my portfolio. And if there was an opportunity to tax loss over time. And then I realized that I was doing all of these things that were pretty straightforward to implement. I just needed to spend my time doing them. Betterment automates the same good practices so that I know I'm doing portfolio management and goal-based planning in a way that makes sense and is responsible without me having to spend hours of my life doing it.

31:22Learn more at Betterment.com. Investing involves risk, performance not guaranteed. Betterment does not offer tax advice. TLH may not be suitable for all customers. Learn more at Betterment.com slash TLH dash terms.