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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

For two and a half years, Ukraine has been fighting Russia with the goal of total victory – to not only beat Putin’s forces back to the border but to reclaim all territory annexed by Russia since 1991.

But as both President Zelensky and Putin’s popularity and resources fade and as another winter approaches, it’s possible that a different more pragmatic end to the war could be in sight.

Today, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist Zanny Minton Beddoes on what it would take for a permanent end to the fighting and the future for Ukraine if that can’t be reached.

It’s Wednesday, October 9.

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RUBY:

So Zanny, you recently travelled to Ukraine close to the front lines of its war with Russia. Tell me about why you went there and what you were hoping to find out.

ZANNY:

So I've been to Ukraine a couple of times since the beginning of the full scale war in 2022, but each time I'd only been to Kiev, the capital. I really wanted to get a sense for myself of what it was actually like to be in the parts of the country that were closer to the front where now, you know, October 2024, two and a half years after the war began, winter is coming. The country's under pressure on the eastern front. We've got the US elections coming, so there are lots of reasons why Ukraine is currently under a lot of pressure. And rather than just simply talking to politicians in Kiev, I wanted to get a sense for myself of what things were like across the country.

So we crisscrossed the country. We went from Odesa to Kharkiv to Kramatorsk to Zaporizhia to all kinds of places that hitherto had only been names on a map.

Audio excerpt — Zanny Minton Beddoes:

“Somewhere near here we’ve been given a drop pin to meet the deputy commander of the 93rd brigade…”

ZANNY:

But it was a very sobering experience going to the east, going quite close to the front and getting a real sense of what life was like for people who lived in the town near the front lines.

Audio excerpt — Zanny Minton Beddoes:

“They’re waiting for us. There's a vehicle there, a pick up truck.”

RUBY:

And one of the places that you visited was this secret location in the basement of a Soviet era building. And you were there to talk to the Ukrainians who were really on the front lines of drone warfare. So can you tell me about that and the people that you spoke to?

ZANNY:

I did. I can't tell you exactly where the building is but it was, as you say, a nondescript Soviet era residential building. And inside was the sort of headquarters of one of Ukraine's drone battalions.

Audio excerpt — Zanny Minton Beddoes:

“Walking along a darkened corridor from the commander's office.”

ZANNY:

And as you went into the long, dark corridors into the basement area, it felt like, frankly, going into a movie. There were huge numbers of screens all over the wall. There were young people with what looked like video game controllers and they were controlling drones.

Audio excerpt — Soldier:

“They start moving from this big forest to our position over here.”

ZANNY:

And it was a very surreal view of the battlefront. And I was watching one drone commander as he was manoeuvring his reconnaissance drone. It was, he told me, 20km inside the Russian lines. And we saw a large antenna and he swooped in on this antenna and it had been clear that something had been placed on it. And they were discussing amongst themselves and thought it must have been communication equipment or something. And so they were sending in a drone to try and take it out.

Audio excerpt — Zanny Minton Beddoes:

What do you think they fixed to that?

Audio excerpt — Soldier:

“I think this is maybe communication between artillery and some flying...”

Audio excerpt — Zanny Minton Beddoes:

“And that's why you want to take it out.”

Audio excerpt — Soldier:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ZANNY:

And while I was there at this drone command centre, I met with the commander of this battalion, a young man whose callsign is Achilles, but who is called Yuri.

Audio excerpt — Zanny Minton Beddoes:

“Can I ask you how old you are?”

Audio excerpt — Yuri:

"33 years old now."

Audio excerpt — Zanny Minton Beddoes:

“33 years old. And how long have you been commander for?”

Audio excerpt — Yuri:

"The start of war."

Audio excerpt — Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Since the start of the war.

ZANNY:

He was a young man, short, dark hair, dark eyebrows. He had a single earring, a kind of Cossack style earring with an engraved bell bottom and he joined the National Guard at 18. He fought in eastern Ukraine when the Russians first invaded in 2014. But in 2022, when the full scale invasion happened, he went back and is now fighting alongside his friends. And he's become one of the most well, sort of one of most highly regarded Ukrainian drone hotshots.

Audio excerpt — Zanny Minton Beddoes:

“And yours is one of the most effective drone battalions.”

Audio excerpt — Yuri:

“The top three.”

Audio excerpt — Zanny Minton Beddoes:

“Top three?”

Audio excerpt — Yuri:

“Yes.”

RUBY:

And can you tell me just a little bit more about the extent to which this war is being fought using drones and what these drones actually do on the battlefield?

ZANNY:

I think this is the way in which the Ukrainian war has really changed modern warfare the most. It is a war which is absolutely dominated by drones at the battlefront. There are reconnaissance drones which are high above the battlefield. There are strike drones. There are even land drones now. And both sides are making and delivering huge sort of unfathomable quantities of drones.

Audio excerpt — Drone producer:

“Our forces are flying more than 1.3 million are flying on the front line.”

Audio excerpt — Zanny Minton Beddoes:

“1.3 million drone flights in one month.”

Audio excerpt — Drone producer:

“In one month.”

ZANNY:

And actually, I went to see one of these drone producers in Kiev, and it's a sort of a factory essentially making drones. And the drones at some level look like ordinary civilian drones but then onto them, explosives are strapped and some are very simple, some are very, very sophisticated. The Ukrainians have developed incredibly sophisticated long range drone sea drones, which have effectively pushed the Russian fleet out of the Black Sea.

It's a very strange feeling to see this war being fought like a cat and mouse game between drones on both sides. And so the actual battlefield seems very still and very quiet because the minute anything moves, any soldier moves, any vehicle moves, the other side's drones see it and come and attack. And so it affects all kinds of aspects of this war. So, for example, wounded soldiers in the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, often soldiers have to remain where they were wounded for hours until it is safe. If the light changes just at dawn and dusk, you can get people out and until then, soldiers have to stay because there are these drones.

Audio excerpt — Zanny Minton Beddoes:

“So they're behind us, 12km behind us? But if you stand up, can you see their lines…”

ZANNY:

And I was talking to a Ukrainian commander at the top of a hill approximately 12 km from the Russians and we were on what seemed to me to be one of the only sort of naturally raised points. So we had an extremely good view but at the same time it was very exposed. And that was the one moment I asked him. I said, “which way are the Russians?” And he pointed and I said, “can they see us?” And he said, “not with the naked eye”.

And I said, “but can their drone see us?”

Audio excerpt — Commander:

“Tak, tak.”

ZANNY:

And he said, yes of course.

Audio excerpt — Zanny Minton Beddoes:

“Okay, well, let's move before they see us too much.”

ZANNY:

And it suddenly struck me that maybe we shouldn't be hanging around there too long.

RUBY:

And so for those soldiers who are physically on the front lines in trench warfare, as you say, I mean, their lives are in danger at every moment. Was there a time in your reporting trip where the reality of that hit you?

ZANNY:

We were in a place called Pavlohrad which is the largest town in Dnipro province, which is about 100 km from the front line, from Pokrovsk, which is the city in eastern Ukraine that is currently under the greatest pressure from the Russians.

Audio excerpt — Unidentified man:

“Pavlohrad also has an explosives factory, a military complex there…”

ZANNY:

And we were picking up fuel at a petrol station there and I saw a very very large bus with flashing lights go past and I asked my colleagues, I said what is that?

Audio excerpt — Zanny Minton Beddoes:

“What was that bus that just went by? It looked like a kind of police bus. It was a bus with police sirens.”

ZANNY:

They looked at the number on the front and it said 300.

Audio excerpt — Unidentified man:

“So if you look closely at the front of that bus, was the sign 300? Now, in military terms, 300 means severely wounded.”

ZANNY:

And they said that’s a bus with wounded soldiers. Any bus with 300 on the front has severely wounded soldiers. If it has 200 on the front it means they’re dead soldiers.

And it was an enormous bus. And those buses go through this town of Pavlohrad very very frequently.

Audio excerpt — Unidentified woman:

“I dunno, I get really really sad seeing this bus for some reason…”

ZANNY:

And it was a moment where you suddenly got a scale of the suffering, the scale of the horror. That’s when you realised that scale of bus was just going past several times a day.

RUBY:

Coming up after the break – a possible path to peace.

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RUBY:

Zanny, you spoke to many people in Ukraine about their support or lack of support for the war at this moment in time. Can you tell me a bit about those conversations and what people said to you about how they were feeling this far in?

ZANNY:

So I was really trying to get a sense of that, because if you look at opinion polls in Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians are reluctant to give up any territory. The definition of victory in Ukraine, the official definition of what it will be to be victorious, is that Ukraine must win back all the territory that Russia has stolen since 1991. So not just the land it's occupied since 2022, but the Crimea and the entirety of the Donbas. So the bit that they went into in 2015. But if you look at the opinion polls, a growing share, it's still a minority, but a growing share of people are willing to consider some kind of trade off that they lose some land in exchange for peace. And I wanted to kind of get a sense of that from people through individual conversations.

And while we were in Pavlohrad we went just to talk to people in the market.

Audio excerpt — Zanny Minton Beddoes:

“So you’re selling your apartment?”

Audio excerpt — Tatyana:

[Answers in Ukrainian]

ZANNY:

And I spoke to Tatyana, who was a wonderful elderly woman selling flowers. And I asked her what she would do if the Russians came. And she was absolutely categorical that she would become a partisan. She would cook pies for the soldiers.

Audio excerpt — Tatyana:

“I would cook for the soldiers.”

ZANNY:

She had this kind of glint in her eye. And it was a reference to the fact that, you know, Ukrainian grandmothers have been known to poison Russian soldiers with pies. So she was very, very clear that she said, I'm a Ukrainian nationalist. I will fight to the last person. I will never accept this.

But my colleague talked to a young woman, a 19 year old young woman, who said something along the lines of, I just want this to stop. I don't care who runs this place. I just want the war to be over. And he talked to another elderly lady who had lost her husband, who had two sons who were fighting, one who died just nine days earlier. And she was also “this has to stop, I can't bear this any longer”. And I think between the two, it sort of epitomised the tension. They want to push the Russians out. They don't want to allow Russia to get away with this. On the other hand, the reality is that I think everyone knows increasingly that it's going to be impossible militarily in the short term to push the Russians out of everywhere. And that's the sort of political dynamic of how if you're President Zelensky or the politicians in Kiev, how you manage this is really difficult.

RUBY:

What do you think the chances are of some sort of peace deal being struck where Russia keeps all of the territory that it has taken so far? And Ukraine accepts that, but perhaps, you know, draws a line around what it has and fortifies those defences?

ZANNY:

So I am not sure that there will be a formal peace deal because that requires Russia also to agree to its terms. But what was very clear to me after my trip there is, one, that it was important that Ukraine's own definition of victory shifted to being defending credibly and durably the territory it now has. And for that, in my view, it needs not just more Western weaponry. It needs durable Western financial support. And I think, and it's a controversial one, but it's one that we are now clearly arguing for, is that I think the best guarantee of Ukraine's long term security is to be a member of NATO. And the reason this guarantee is so credible is that if Ukraine were to join NATO, it would be covered by what's called Article 5, which is the fundamental underpinning of NATO's, that an attack on one is an attack on all. And that, of course, is the kind of ultimate guarantee it means that were Vladimir Putin to attack a Ukraine that was part of NATO, then he would risk the entire membership of NATO so the entire Western alliance being at war with him. You would move beyond a kind of kinetic war of the sort you've got now to a Ukraine that had an aspiration to regain all of its territory through diplomatic means rather than through fighting for them.

RUBY:

And Zanny, at the beginning of the war, it seemed like Volodymyr Zelensky was this kind of rock star figure, a hero to his people. So has that changed as the war has continued on? Has the way that his country views him shifted?

ZANNY:

I think it has shifted almost inevitably, right, after two and a half years of war? He is, I mean, if you just look at the polls, he's less popular than he was. But I think he's still seen as the sort of avatar of Ukraine and he's still seen as someone who can most effectively deliver the message of what Ukraine needs. But I think the problem that he has is how does he shift his own people to a definition of victory that is not this absolutist we will regain all of our territory all the way to our 1991 borders? And he's been saying that and it's become a kind of mantra in Kiev, even though I think very few people really believe it. And he's been assisted in not doing that, I think, by Ukraine's Western partners who have been doing Ukraine somewhat of a disservice because they have said consistently Ukraine must win and only Ukraine can decide what victory is. And so they've both been able to hide behind what is increasingly becoming a fiction. It's going to take a lot of political courage and deftness to shift the conversation to say to Ukrainians, actually, we need to think about this differently.

RUBY:

And if that doesn't happen, what is at stake for Ukraine?

ZANNY:

So I think a huge amount is at stake here. It always has been in this war.

You could see the Russians moving further. You could see a political fragmentation of Ukrainian society fracturing. It's now, remember, a heavily armed country with a lot of weapons and a lot of soldiers, brigades, all of which could become kind of, you know, partisan brigades. You could see a growing anger, a sense that the country had been abandoned by the West.

So it could be very grim. You could see the Russians roll on through a long way. Ukraine could be, you know, at least large parts of it could be lost. And I think it would be just catastrophic for Ukraine but also an incredible loss for the West and gain for Vladimir Putin, which would then of course, risk him wanting and going further.

It really is important to put it too simplistically that the good guys win. But that means framing victory in a way that is, you know, achievable and realistic.

RUBY:

Zanny, thank you so much for your time.

ZANNY:

You're very welcome. Nice to talk to you again.

RUBY:

You can hear Zanny’s full report from Ukraine on The Economist Podcast. The episode is called ‘Crunch time for Ukraine’.

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Also in the news today,

Australia’s former defence chiefs are warning the country remains unprepared to navigate the security threats arising from climate change.

The report from the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group is condemning of government inaction, saying the issue is the biggest security threat facing Australia.

The report has also put forward recommendations to increase action on climate change and ensure Australia is better prepared.

And

And a series of speakers addressed a press conference in Parliament House yesterday, to accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and demand the government impose sanctions.

The conference was organised by crossbenchers, who were joined by Palestinians, doctors and activists.

Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton condemned the Prime Minister for putting forward a motion in parliament to mark a year since October 7, saying the motion’s calls for ceasefire and de-escalation went too far.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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