Thirty-day trial? A Ukraine-ceasefire proposal

0:10Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer. And I'm Rosie Bloor. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the event shaping your world.

0:24Our correspondents sat down yesterday with one of NATO's supreme allied commanders, a man with nuanced views on how Europe must steal itself for the future, and with a surprising take on how America fits in.

0:41And smoking, boozing, fast food, yeah, yeah, we all know they're bad for our health. But here's the thing. A new study suggests that one of the most important predictors of an early death is loneliness.

1:02First up, though.

1:12Marco Rubio, America's Secretary of State, emerged from eight hours of negotiations in Saudi Arabia yesterday with at least a plausible step towards peace in Ukraine. Today we've made an offer that the Ukrainians have accepted, which is to enter into a ceasefire and into immediate negotiations to end this conflict in a way that's enduring and sustainable. Ukrainian officials agreed to a reciprocal 30-day ceasefire in exchange for the resumption of American military and intelligence help. But just as America's talks with Russia last month on the matter didn't include Ukraine, these talks with Ukraine didn't involve Russia, which must now agree to the terms.

1:53The ball, as Mr. Rubio put it, is now in Russia's court. And as uncertain as it all still is, even this step was an outcome that had been by no means assured. So going into Tuesday, there were two absolutely different viewpoints. Oliver Carroll is our Ukraine correspondent. One was pretty hopeful that perhaps the Americans would renew intelligence and military assistance. The other one, which was the dominant one, was that we had essentially a train crash about to happen. Two locomotives headed for each other at very high speed. And throughout yesterday, I was getting these updates from my various sources, some of them with thumbs up, others saying everything's going well, barely believing what was happening.

2:37And then it came, this full ceasefire proposal, a resetting of assistance. And with that, Zelensky's nightmare of the White House had been all but forgotten. And so do you have a sense for what the feeling in the room was when it did indeed come? Right. So part of the background is that people were expecting the talks to be led on the American side by Steve Witkoff, this pugnacious envoy that Mr. Trump has been using in his peace negotiations. In the end, it was Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Michael Watts. And as my source was telling me, it was a good thing that Witkoff wasn't there.

3:17They said it was much more constructive without him. And in fact, I was speaking to one of the four people in the Ukrainian delegation shortly after the talks had finalized, Pavlov Palisar. He'd just gone out for a breather and, you know, he was walking outside and he gave me an insider's view of those talks, the eight hours of talks. And he said they went into the session with their proposals of a partial ceasefire on land and sea, a prisoner exchange and return of children who'd been taken by Russia. So basically, this was a halt to deep strikes, drones, ballistic and cruise missiles coming the other way.

3:53And then quite unexpectedly, actually, they had game plan for this. But the Americans asked, would they consider a complete ceasefire if Russia would agree to that? And so they called Zelensky and he said, OK. After that, things shifted pretty fast. They agreed to restart military and intelligence sharing. And Palliser told me that within a couple of hours of the meeting ended, He'd speak to an American general who'd confirmed the order had gone through.

4:23Volodymyr Zelenskyy was very happy with the way the tables had turned. He said he considered it positive. Ukraine is ready to take the step, and the United States needs to convince Russia to do so. So actually, Ukraine and America are on a much more rational trajectory. It's taken them a long time to get there, but clearly the ball is now back in Russia's court. So you mentioned a total, if temporary, ceasefire, resumption of military intelligence aid. What else is in the deal? There were so many other things that may have come out. Well, there is an agreement in principle to sign this Minerals deal that's been on the table for a couple of weeks and which was supposed to have been signed in that White House meeting.

5:08But the big question is right now what Moscow will demand in return, because it seems pretty clear that they hadn't gone into that meeting, the Americans, with prior assurance from the Russians that they would agree to this. And Pallas has said to me that basically this is something to be continued. And I think, you know, the important thing to say is that so far, Russia really hasn't been taking part in these negotiations. It's been really America pushing the Ukrainians for concessions. But Russia now has a dilemma. They need to demonstrate that they're honest parties, capable of agreement. and I was speaking to a security source just in the evening yesterday and he was saying we wait for Putin.

5:47They'll try and string things out, but perhaps by the end of the week they'll come to a position. My understanding, speaking to sources in Moscow, quite close to the Kremlin, is that they will attempt to eke out certain concessions from Ukraine which will be very difficult for them to accept. For example, they don't want any foreign forces inside Ukraine as a contingent after a ceasefire is implemented. They'll insist on neutrality. They will demand territorial concessions. They may also demand elections as a way of getting rid of Zelensky and creating disorder inside Ukraine. So I think we need to wait because the Russians, even though they haven't been negotiating so far, are actually very skilled negotiators.

6:29And I don't expect Trump to shift his position on trusting Vladimir Putin anytime soon. And many people inside Ukraine worry that neither the United States nor Ukraine has that kind of experience to match the cynical, complex deal-making of Putin's men. So as you say, it's still very unclear how Moscow would respond. Your view at this stage is we shouldn't be sort of celebrating a nearing of the end of the war just yet. Right. We have to say that we're talking about very low bars and, you know, we're excited that we've gone higher than that low bar, but it's really important not to get carried away.

7:05I understand security guarantees, for example, the thing that Ukrainians are most interested in because they don't want Russia returning with greater forces further down the road. They were discussed, but they remain vague. Several sources suggested to me that, you know, as I say, very embryonic. The Americans so far haven't shown any indication they're willing to backstop a European reassurance force. And I don't think that's going to be forthcoming. And then the other thing which is important to say is that the ceasefire proposal isn't being presented at a time of complete calm on the either eastern or inside Russia fronts.

7:39The eastern front is much more stable than it was. And in fact, Ukraine is counterattacking in several areas. And if anything, the Russians are on the back foot there. The concern is in Korsk, this enclave inside Russia that Ukraine has occupied since last August. And the concern is that we're seeing another situation like we saw in February 2015, which was a moment that the Russians were also negotiating. But then Russians basically continued fighting despite the ceasefire agreement. And when I was speaking to Pallas last night, he said, yes, this is similar and they hadn't actually fleshed this out.

8:13So, as I say, with forces advancing in Korsk and trying to carve out Ukrainian land elsewhere, Putin may not be ready for a ceasefire. But the focus has changed. The question is no longer what Ukraine is willing to accept, but what Putin is prepared to accept or offer. That in itself is a huge breakthrough for Ukraine. But what hasn't been mentioned so far is what Ukrainians will accept at home. How do you think the ceasefire agreement is landing at home? Right. So just this week, we have an interesting new poll coming out and it shows some very revealing things. The first thing, actually, I think, before we move to the point about Ukrainians' views on the war is that Mr.

8:57Zelensky is really polling very well. He's seen a very clear surge of patriotic uplift. Our figures show that more than seven in 10 approve of him and are trusting of his negotiation stance. Of course, this is a place in time. Ukrainians are reacting to what they see as a stab in the back from the Americans, and they are rallying around the flag bearer. But Mr. Trump and his acolytes have been pushing this idea of Mr. Zelensky being this illegitimate dictator with 4 % support. Well, you know, these are frankly numbers Mr. Trump would die for. But as I say, it's not all good news. The polling shows that a lot of Ukrainians are very concerned about corruption and division inside Ukraine.

9:39But the public appetite for concessions. What we found is actually, far from being this belligerent outlier, Mr. Zelensky in many respects is perhaps less belligerent than his population on various issues. So, for example, pretty much three quarters of the population said they were ready to fight on even without American support. And the only concessions that they say they're countenanced to make, renouncing the idea of NATO membership, you barely have a majority there. It's within statistical error. So although the picture looks rather rosy for Mr. Zelensky, his face towards this choice, he either doubles down, follows his public's view, and essentially makes negotiations very difficult, or he folds and becomes unpopular for the position he's taken.

10:26So things are not about to get any easier for Mr. Zelensky. Oliver, thanks very much for your time, as ever. Great to chat, Jason.

10:46Even if a ceasefire does come to Ukraine, even if it can be maintained, questions will remain about defense far beyond Ukraine's borders. What do Europe's major and minor powers need to do to scale up their military capabilities? How does America fit in? Where might Vladimir Putin's expansionist eye wander next? To talk that through, another meeting took place yesterday between Shishank Joshi, our defense editor, Sophie Petter, our Paris bureau chief, and Pierre Vendier, one of NATO's top brass.

11:23So, Shishank, yesterday you and Sophie spoke with Admiral Vendier, who's one of NATO's two strategic commanders. Before we get into what he said, just run me through a little bit who he is. Admiral Vendier is NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, or SAC-T, as it's known. So he's one of NATO's most senior military officials. He's a former commander of France's navy. There's always a delicate national balance inside the alliance where the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, or SAC-T, is an American. SAC-T's deputy is always a Brit. And the SAC-T is a French officer almost always. And so he's responsible effectively for the transformation of NATO.

12:10You could think of that as a job basically about future capability, future doctrine, and technology. So how does NATO become a more agile, adaptable, future-oriented force? And he's preparing for future warfare, you could say. He's a former naval fighter pilot, So he's got a lot of operational experience. And he's been in this role since June of last year. And Sophie, in a nutshell, what did he say in the course of your interview? I found Admiral Vendier to be more frank and more candid, I would say, the most senior military officers that you speak to. He sounded the alarm in particular about European security, laid out what was a fairly sobering timeline for Europe to rearm.

12:58He thinks Europe has probably three or four years to prepare for a resurgent Russia after any ceasefire that might be secured in Ukraine. They don't have an HR problem as the West. They have good engineers. They are very good in EW, in space, in cyber. And so for them, it's not that difficult to resume something in short term. So I think on the Western perspective, we have a problem of time. But it's also interesting because he argued that Europe shouldn't worry too much about America not sticking around on the continent. That was a surprising line. But he does want allies to spend 15 % or so of additional cash that it puts into arms on new capabilities.

13:48And Chishank, we've talked before about Europe and changing defense stance and the armaments that may require. What does the Admiral reckon that money should be spent on? Well, unsurprisingly, given his job, he is emphasizing technology. But he's emphasizing technology not to necessarily replace all kinds of hardware, but to supplement them. Today, we have a new force mix. You don't envisage anymore to have ships without drones, to have tanks without drones. You don't envisage to work without space and high-speed ISR. You don't envisage not to have EW, electronic warfare. You don't envisage not to work with AI to possess a huge amount of data.

14:32I thought that a really interesting example of that that he gave was Baltic Sentry. This is a mission that NATO launched in January. If you recall, there were concerns, Jason, over Russia sabotaging undersea cables. And he said, look, the problem is the ships that are doing this, the shortage of those ships, the cost of crewing those ships, maintaining them, means that you can't sustain these patrols. You can't send a frigate of 300 people just to check out some cables and monitor some hapless fishing vessels. He said, is that a good way to spend your money? So he launched Task Force X, which is a fleet of autonomous naval systems, effectively naval drones, which he thinks can do a lot of this persistent surveillance in the Baltic much more effectively and cheaply than sending a whole bunch of very, very expensive warships to do the same job.

15:23But I think his point is, in addition to these new types of hardware, new types of concepts, there also has to be a much more fundamental cultural change. What do you mean by that? Well, if you talk to NATO generals or admirals, they all agree invariably that their forces have to be more modern, use more technology. But in practice, what we heard from Admiral Vendier is that there's a lot of resistance to change. He described it, I thought, very interestingly, as a fight against ourselves. You see this everywhere. And so it's a reason why, for example, on fighters, it's always a question to work with unmanned, because pilots think they will lose their job and so they're fighting for.

16:07So you see this. He talked about pilots who worry they will lose their jobs. He said that, look, if you're a hypothetical lieutenant commander, a mid-level officer involved in planning a future force, would you rather program drones or would you rather command a ship? It's a rhetorical question that biases towards more prominent, prestigious hardware that you can lead in command. And that's where your promotions come. So some of that, I suppose, is unsurprising. Europe needs to arm up and to get people involved in the new technology. But what is surprising, Sophie, is your mention that the Admiral said no one need worry too much about America backing away from the continent.

16:48Come back to that. Well, it was surprising, I think, both to Shashank and myself. We weren't expecting that. There's obviously a lot of concern in European capitals about American disengagement at the time of a war that's unresolved still on European soil. But he doesn't think that the U.S. will disengage from Europe. He argued that NATO's European members do not need to change their capability targets to account for the Trump era. But he said Europe does need an adult conversation. That was his phrase. In a way, it was an implicit rebuke to allies who are worried and talk as if the alliance is crumbling.

17:30But Admiral Vendier's point was that an adult discussion is about the kinds of capabilities that Europe needs to do more of. And that is the sort of conversation he wants Europe to have. There's a slightly panicked mood in Europe. There's grave concern about America pulling out its nuclear umbrella, leaving Europe by itself. And it's worth remembering that inside NATO itself, at the very top of this alliance, the mood is just very different and much more placid than you might expect when you talk to national capitals. And I think that what makes that view particularly credible is the fact that this is a French admiral who is making this case.

18:16And France has had a slightly prickly relationship with NATO over the decades, ever since de Gaulle pulled France out of NATO's military command in 1966. So I don't think that when he makes those kind of comments that he's reflecting an overly optimistic assessment. I think that it is probably what the prevailing view in NATO is at the moment. Sophie Shushank, thank you both very much for your time. Thank you, Jason. Thanks, Jason.

18:58For centuries, emperors and alchemists searched for an elixir of youth. Today, Silicon Valley billionaires pour fortunes into cutting-edge longevity treatments. But the real secrets to a longer life are neither mystical nor high-tech. You just need to look at the data. The UK Biobank contains the genetic and medical data of around half a million British people. It's this really detailed database that, as well as having this medical information, also contains data on these individuals' income, lifestyle and upbringing. Ainsley Johnston is a data journalist for The Economist. So in this new study that's just been published in the journal Nature Medicine, they used this data to try and disentangle the effect that different factors have on the risk of getting different diseases and also the risk of mortality.

19:53And it found a couple of things that were not that surprising. For example, smoking increases your risk of a premature death and exercise can ward it off. But they also uncovered a surprisingly big effect of loneliness on your life expectancy. And what did they show about how loneliness affects life expectancy? They found that social connections were really a surprisingly powerful predictor of a long life. So they found that living with a partner was roughly as beneficial as taking regular exercise for extending your life. So to put a number on that, if you compared a person who lived alone with another person who lived with a partner, but who had the same age, sex, income, demographics, that person would have a roughly 20 % lower risk of death each year than the person who lived alone.

20:47They also found that having regular visits with friends and family or people who reported that they had someone to confide in were also at a lower risk of an early death. So this isn't the first study to find an effect of loneliness or mortality, but it is the first to compare the effects of all of these different lifestyle factors and the first that's able to say loneliness is roughly equivalent to not taking part in regular exercise. And did they give any sense of why that is, of why loneliness has such a big effect? So we know from this study and from others that came before it, that people who are socially isolated tend to have higher levels of cellular inflammation in their bodies, and they also have poorer immune responses.

21:34So if they get an infection, they'll react more poorly to it. What's not really clear is whether this is actually a direct effect of living alone, or because lonely people tend to have poorer diets and be less active than people who are in regular interaction with other people. We also know that loneliness affects mental well-being which is also really important in longevity. So this study found that people who often report being fed up or unenthusiastic were also at higher risk of a premature death. So people who often report feeling tired had a 45 % greater risk of mortality than people who were more energetic.

22:13I would have thought genetics would play a big role. What did they say about the other factors? So genetics actually surprisingly played a pretty minor role in people's overall longevity. So together they found that all of these environmental and lifestyle factors accounted for roughly 17 % in the overall variability between people and how long they lived. But genetics actually only accounted for around 3%, so far, far less impact on longevity. They did find that genetics play a really strong role in predicting your risk of certain diseases, so Alzheimer's, for example, and breast cancer as well.

22:54But overall, environment and lifestyle factors played a much bigger role. Okay, so Ainsley, given the importance of lifestyle factors and socialization, how can we live longer? What are your tips? This study is really tempting to take it as advice for a longer life, but there are some caveats to these findings. This study, you have to really remember, is all about correlation and not causation. So, for example, some of their findings are kind of funny, really. They found that people who had an open fireplace or people who ate more cheese, for example tended to live a little longer but in reality think about that a little bit more it's probably not that these things are really slowing down aging it's probably that these factors are really just linked to higher socioeconomic status in the UK and that some aspect of that is causing people to live longer having more money or having a more comfortable lifestyle but there are things that obviously we can take away from it physical activity is clearly very important, not smoking.

23:58And also loneliness and socialization are clearly very important to living a long and healthy life.

24:09Go forth and socialize seems like a good motto to live by. Ainsley, thank you so much. Great to talk to you. Great. Thank you, Rosie.

24:34That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.