Protests against Zelenskyy as drones torment Ukraine

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Luke Harding:Today, as Russian drones pummel Kiev, Ukrainians take to the streets to protest against Vladimir Zelensky.

0:23The situation in Kiev has definitely changed since I've been coming to Ukraine and reporting. I mean, I came before the invasion in late 2021, and I've been here pretty consistently ever since.

0:34Luke Harding:This is Luke Harding, a senior foreign correspondent at The Guardian. And the blunt fact is the Russians are bombing Kiev, another Ukrainian towns and cities more and more and more. And it used to be that 30 or 40 drones felt like a lot. now in the last few weeks we've seen the Kremlin routinely sending 400, 500, 600, even 700 drones across the country. It's strange, it's almost as if this place has been bewitched, something out of a fairy tale where by day it's normal. There are guys on electric bikes, food delivery people, there are restaurants open, coffee shops, couples, young people, students, old people, Normal European city.

1:18And then at night, there's this fell enchantment and it becomes infernal. And you just hear this kettle drum boom of explosions. And you think, oh, my God.

1:35The rule is you're between two walls. Some Ukrainians put their kids or themselves or their pets in the bathtub, which is a good place to be because it's sort of enclosed. More and more people have been going to the metros. They're packed out, actually to the point where it's quite hard to find somewhere to sit.

2:02On the one hand, it's terrible. On the other hand, I do sort of feel that Kiev is the most important city in Europe. I mean, it feels to me like Berlin felt during the Cold War, the place where the future of Europe will be decided. Either whether the Russians win, they prevail, and we're in a new age of conquest and imperialism, or whether actually the Enlightenment ideal of humankind, of decency, of freedom, and so on, whether that prevails. And I don't know the answer, but for now I'm strangely quite happy to be here.

2:35Luke Harding:From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus. Protests on the streets of Kiev as the bombs rain down.

2:49Luke Harding:Luke, you were last on the show in March with me after that excruciating showdown in the Oval Office between Vladimir Zelensky and Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. And you are now back in Kiev where, as you've already just told us, there's been a definite change in atmosphere. not just because of the drone strikes, but also, I think, because there's some growing unhappiness with some of Zelensky's decisions. What's been happening there this month? It's been a really interesting moment, Helen. And I came back from the front line to Kiev after a pretty grueling trip thinking, I'll just have a few quiet days.

3:24I can write up my stuff and so on. And let's hope they don't bomb too much, the Russians. And suddenly this political crisis came from nowhere, basically because Volodymyr Zelensky and his team pushed a bill through parliament, the Ukrainian parliament, the Vakovna Rada, with crazy haste. It was voted on in an afternoon. And essentially this bill stripped the independents from the two sort of key anti-corruption agencies. I mean, there are several law enforcement anti-corruption agencies here, but there were two independent ones set up in 2014 after what Ukrainians call the revolution of dignity.

4:00In other words, the Maidan, the anti-government protests 2013, 2014, in which saw Viktor Yanukovych, fantastically corrupt pro-Russian president, run away to Moscow. And so basically the Americans and other partners said, you know, your system is so compromised, you need these two agencies to kind of keep you honest if we're going to support you. One of which is called NABU, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau. That's the most famous one. And Zelensky essentially was taking away their autonomy, handing it over to law enforcement agencies which report to him. In other words, cases, particularly against high-level officials, would then be determined by the Zelensky team.

4:39Luke Harding:And these anti-corruption bodies, so they were supposed to be independent from the government. Why did Zelensky then decide that he was going to get rid of them? Well, I mean, that's a very interesting question. We don't fully know. But there is a backstory, which is there's been a simmering feud between the SBU, which is the security service of Ukraine, which is loyal to Zelensky, and Nabu, the anti-corruption body. And there have been arrests, there have been investigations and counter-investigations. The security service says it's found three individuals in Nabu, which has got 700 staff, with Russian connections.

5:15And Zelensky has said, well, I'm doing this to cleanse Nabu of Russian influence. In other words, he's been implying that they're, you know, fifth columnists. At the same time, the deputy head of NABU, who's also been accused of evading military service, has given some pretty strong interviews criticizing Zelensky, accusing him of dictatorial behavior, authoritarianism and so on. And I think it's no secret this has irritated the president's office big time. And we don't fully know, but I think they did it because they thought they could probably get away with it. And of course, the pushback was enormous.

5:48And what was interesting about this was just how quickly civil society responded. So this is day two of protests against a controversial bill which President Volodymyr Zelensky signed late on Tuesday evening, which effectively gets rid of the independence of two key... Within hours of the decision, there were protests. I went to protests all of last week. In a small square opposite a dramatic theatre with swifts hurtling around the summer sky. This is a bigo. I would say there are about 4 ,000 or 5 ,000 people here. and they are shouting outside Zelensky's office window. He can hear them. And they're saying, hands off, Nabu, which is the independent anti-corruption agency.

6:35They've also been shouting, shame, blowing whistles. There were really young people who, some of them are telling me they were nine when Ukraine last had a revolution, so now 21-year-old students. Well, my placard says, I would like to see the future, not the flashbacks. I'm 21 too, so I was nine years old in 2014. And this is pretty much our first big protest in Ukraine. And we feel like it's our duty because most of the people who were here in 2014, not very far from here, actually, at the Maidan, they are at the war right now at the front line. So not too many people are left to protest. And we feel like it's our civic duty to be here and to protect our rights.

7:13And there was this astonishing manifestation of people power with lots of placards, some of them funny, some of them not funny, all of them angry. So today I came with a banner that says, the light in the window is a crack in the sky. And I just crossed out the word sky and wrote the democracy. Because I was a big fan of Ozzy Osbourne. It's my favorite singer. I mean, I talked to demonstrators waving angry placards. And I said, is Zelensky a dictator? And they said, no, he's not a dictator. Is he a dictator?

7:45Luke Harding:No, no, he's not. Why not? Because he's the president of Ukraine. And he couldn't be a dictator. He's our leader still in wartime in a difficult political context where the Russians want to destroy us. But he's made a mistake. And we are here to remind him that we elect the government. You know, we are the power. We are the people. It's a very easy situation to exploit. Wartime government has more responsibilities and can do more and can twist the democracy more easily. and we're here to show that they can do that to us. We're not Russia. We're a democratic society. We value our path to Europe.

8:22We want to be there and, yeah, we stand for democratic values. So it's complicated, but there has been a critique for a while now that Zelensky and the people around him are sliding towards, I mean, you can call it authoritarianism or you can say that they're centralising. But Zelensky, I think, realised fairly quickly he'd made a pretty big mistake.

8:42Luke Harding:I have to say, I do find it pretty startling that people have the bandwidth to take to the streets to protest about something like this when there are literally bombs raining down on them every night. But fair play to them, it does seem to have worked. Zelensky has now submitted another bill to the Ukrainian parliament to restore the independence of those two corruption bodies. And parliament is going to discuss that on Thursday this week.

9:11Luke Harding:So it sounds like the people who have taken to the streets, they're not trying to, they're not calling for regime change. They're not trying to get rid of Zelensky. They're just saying, hang on a minute. You're, what, they're saying you're kind of better than this? Yeah, I mean, you're better than this is a fair summary. I mean, I wouldn't call it a regime. I mean, bear in mind, I mean, the Russians call it a regime. Bear in mind that Zelensky won 72 % of the vote in a Democrat election in 2019. He won a landslide, ironically enough, on an anti-corruption ticket. And there is no mood for elections in wartime, actually, which is a kind of Russian and a MAGA talking point in America, because you can't hold elections whenever Russian drone operators see a crowd of people, they try and kill them.

10:01Luke Harding:Let's turn now to the war and how it's actually going on the battlefield three and a half years in. I know that you were in eastern Ukraine recently, where the Russian bombardment is constant. Are the Russians gaining ground in the east? And how significant is it if they are? I mean, yes, they are, but at a slow pace. And so these things are perspectival. So if you look at Putin's original plan in 2022, in the spring of 2022, which was to seize Kiev in three days, overrun the whole country, mop up all resistance by summer, and basically fold Ukraine back into Russia, into a great Russia so that it disappeared, and was eradicated like some sort of medieval duchy.

10:44That was the plan. And of course, the Russians retreated from Kiev. They abandoned much of northeastern Ukraine. There were counteroffenses, successful Ukrainian counteroffenses in 2022, reclaiming quite a lot of land. So compared to that, actually, it's a failure. But also you have to acknowledge that the Russians have lost more than a million people killed and wounded. A million. A huge number. I mean, I can give you the numbers or I can just tell you what I've seen from surveillance drone footage, which is these small Russian infantry groups going in day after day into grey zone villages, completely smashed up and being killed by drones, by artillery.

11:23I mean, it's, Helen, it's gruesome. I mean, you know, their legs are blown off. They bleed out under trees. and the Russian tactics, I mean, they're called meat assaults, but essentially they send in quite often armoured vehicles, tanks, then sometimes guys on motorbikes and buggies like Mad Max, that they die pretty quickly. And there's small groups of infantry whose job is to reveal Ukrainian firing positions, in other words, the Ukrainian defensive line, and they do that by dying. So they're sort of sent forward, they're killed, and then the people back can sort of see where they're killed from and then call in glide bombs, air bombs to destroy the Ukrainian positions.

12:03Now, these tactics are inhuman, but they're effective. And we've seen where I was, the Russians are now threatening Dnipro-Petroskoblis for the first time since the full-scale war. Looks like they'll seize territory there soon. Where's that? It's between Dnipro-Petroskoblis and the eastern Dnipro-Petroskoblis, between eastern and central eastern Ukraine. So I was in the frontline villages there, which were peaceful, with a Ukrainian charity that's evacuating people. And it's haunting. And some of those villages I went to, you've got these silent cottages, you've got schools boarded up, shops, a few houses walloped already.

12:40You've got the threat of drones, which are ubiquitous on the frontline now on both sides. And there's just a sense of slow, inexorable extinction. And the strategy is to rubble-ify everything, to level everything, to destroy it, and then plant a trickler, a Russian trickler on the ruins and declare victory. And what I struggle to understand is that Putin is determined to annex these provinces of Ukraine. He says are now Russia, including Donetsk. They control about two thirds of it, but not the northern chunk where I was last week. But people can't live in these ruins. I mean, it's desert. There's no light.

13:21There are no shops. You know, they've all been destroyed. There's no water. There's no gas. There's no electricity. I mean, there are a few old people hanging on, living like sort of cave people. And this is being presented to the Russian public as a glorious victory. And the big thing is that Putin's original war goals to take the whole of Ukraine are unchanged. And he said fairly recently that Russia began at the end of a Russian soldier's boot. Essentially, Putin will take whatever he can get. He wants all of it. You know, my assessment is so long as he is there, as long as he is alive in power in the Kremlin, he will continue and this war will continue.

13:56Luke Harding:And according to the UN, June saw more Ukrainian civilians killed than in any other month in the last three years since the war began. And there is a little bit of disagreement about that stat because it can be so difficult to measure these things in the chaos of war. and not all bodies have been found in every battleground. But certainly the losses on the Ukrainian side are horrendous and potentially getting worse. How are people coping with the level of deaths? It's a roulette, actually. It's a deadly roulette. You know, if you think about it statistically, you know probably it's not going to be you.

14:30But every night it's someone. And that someone is often a mum, a kid, a family, an old person, a teenager, someone living on the eighth floor, someone who's just unlucky. And this is Europe. And yet it's being smited night after night after night.

14:48Luke Harding:And let's talk a bit about how Ukraine is defending itself. I think one of the only weapons that Ukraine has in its arsenal to fight back and defend itself against the Russian drone attacks are these Patriot missiles, which are supplied by the US. Can you just tell us what are these missiles and why are they so important for Ukraine right now? Well, the Patriot missile system is is an air defence system, which is, well, first of all, incredibly expensive. I mean, it costs more than a billion dollars for one system. Wow. But also extremely effective. They're the only system capable of shooting down Russian ballistic and cruise missiles, supersonic missiles that just fly at tremendous speeds.

15:29Right. So when I sort of talk earlier about the gunfire, that's to try and bring down the drones, which fly a bit more slowly, but actually the gunfire doesn't really work anymore. I mean, it used to, but now the Russians have improved their drones. They fly higher, they're quicker. Their navigation systems are better. So they're much harder to bring down. But the Patriots stopped these cruise missiles from careening into nine-story apartment blocks and killing 80 people in Australia. But the various problems, one is Ukraine has possibly six that work, possibly eight. It's a big secret, but not a huge number.

16:05And so they need more. And we've seen these negotiations with Donald Trump, with European partners to try and provide more. And what's happened over the last six months since Trump came back to the White House is that the supply of materiel to Ukraine has more or less stopped. Now, he says it's restarting. He says he's going to sell the Europeans these weapons. They just made a deal with the European Union where they're going to pay the United States of America 100 % of the cost of all military equipment. They're going to ship it to the European Union and then they'll distribute it and much of it will go to Ukraine.

16:43But how much has actually been delivered is, I'm not sure, but my sense is either nothing or not much so far. And patriots will certainly help, but the Russians are now mass-producing drones. And one German lass is thinks that soon there'll be a thousand drones a night hitting Ukraine, all parts of Ukraine. This is horror. And for all of the support, this coalition of the willing, this coalition of democratic states, Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, it still doesn't feel quite equal to the menace and the cruelty that's being meted out in Ukraine all the time.

17:22Luke Harding:And everybody in Ukraine was sort of dreading really a Donald Trump victory. And what they feared came to pass, which is that he would be an unreliable defender of Ukraine. But it does feel as though the mood music in the White House has changed a bit in recent months. after that awful showdown in the Oval Office. Trump and Zelensky met, didn't they, at the Pope's funeral. And it feels like the language that Trump is using has softened a little bit. And he has announced a new deal which would involve NATO countries giving weapons to Ukraine, I think buying them off the US and then giving them to Ukraine.

17:57Luke Harding:Do you think that is going to happen? And will it make a material difference to the war? I think that with Trump, you have to distinguish between what he says and what he does. What he says seems to change from day to day. But there has been a tonal change, I agree. I mean, there's been a bit more soft criticism of Vladimir Putin. We thought we had that settled numerous times. And then President Putin goes out and starts launching rockets into some city like Kiev and kills a lot of people in a nursing home or whatever. You have bodies lying all over the street. And I say that's not the way to do it.

18:30So we'll see what happens with that. I'm very disappointed. I'm disappointed in President Putin. But what Trump also did was that there was a bill ready to go in the Senate, which would have imposed punitive sanctions on Russia, but also more importantly, sort of secondary sanctions on China and India, which buy huge amounts of Russian oil, which allows Russia to kind of finance its war. And Trump said, no, I'm going to give Vladimir Putin another 50 days. So it's half from where I am sitting to kind of discern any great toughening of American policy towards Russia.

19:03Luke Harding:And how are Ukrainians feeling about the US at the moment? Well, interesting. I mean, back in November when he won, certainly among kind of elite Ukrainians, Ukrainians collected with sort of politics, there was a feeling that maybe he could do something because there was such enormous frustration with the Biden administration over their policy of incrementalism, their red lines, their caution, their strategic hesitancy. And they thought, well, Trump is a surprise guy. Maybe he'll turn on Putin and help us. And I was saying, I think he's going to betray you. And it's not that I'm kind of Cassandra, but I was right that really he has betrayed Ukraine.

19:43And I think they've concluded that the US, as a minimum, is no longer a dependable partner. And, you know, my sense is that the US is largely exiting from this conflict. Yes, there may be some support, but not a great deal. And I think Ukrainians understand that now, that basically they are looking to Europe for financial help and for military help.

20:09Luke Harding:Coming up, with no end to the war in sight, could Zelensky be replaced?

20:23Luke Harding:Let's talk a bit about what could happen next. Volodymyr Zelensky has always enjoyed a pretty positive image as a wartime hero, particularly overseas. And Trump obviously doesn't feel quite so warmly towards him. But Zelensky is now rowing back after these mass protests against his corruption bill. Is there any world in which he could be replaced, that his position could be in peril at all? Well, I mean, do you want the blunt answer? Yes. The Russians could kill him. Right. They've tried several times before that they would like to get rid of him. What, just by bombing wherever he is? Or do they have somebody?

20:58Well, I'm not sure, but that's a very Russian solution. So I don't think we should be kind of complacent about that. And I know he's very well protected and is careful, but they want him gone and they want his government gone. So that's something to bear in mind. If you put aside that lurid scenario, no, because there can't be elections now. No one really wants elections now. Everyone understands why you can't hold an election when there are thousands of drones flying all over the country, often quite accurately, you know, bombing things. So were there to be polling stations, you could guarantee the Russians would bomb them.