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What Ukraine’s four-year resistance against Russia teaches us about survival
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- [00:08]
A
The Pentagon once said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine could succeed in three days. So as the war rages on more than four years later, what else have world leaders got wrong? For one thing, what a nation's most important source of power is. I'm Samantha Selinger Morse, and you're listening to the MORNING Edition from the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald Today international and political editor Peter Harcher on the underestimated power that Ukraine holds and what it would take for us to acquire it. It's February 26th. Peter, welcome back.
- [00:50]
B
A pleasure to be here with you, Samantha.
- [00:52]
A
Okay, so Tuesday marked four years since Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine. And you have just written that these four years of non stop violence have a number of important lessons to teach all of us, really about the reality of the world that we're now living in. No big deal. So Harger, tell us, tell us about these lessons.
- [01:10]
B
Absolutely. And I think everybody is astonished that with such a mismatch of size, Ukraine has been able to survive for four long years and is entering the fifth year with no sign that it's coming to any sort of conclusion. A country that was ranked 25th in the world in terms of its military firepower, which was Ukraine, and today has about 30 million people against the country that was ranked number two in the world for military power, Russia, which has about 140 million people, that mismatch is astonishing. So that alone makes it a fascinating topic for study. What can we learn? One is the importance of having this is part of the traditional hard power definition of national strength. That is the economic and technological capability to produce the high quality military and technology gear that you need across the full spectrum of needs and to produce it rapidly and consistently. One strategist, Phillips P. O', Brien, put it this way, don't think so much about how many tanks you have, but think about the system that produced those tanks. Do you have a system that can make produce quality tanks adapt in a great hurry and tanks are just a symbol, right? I mean, drones and all other munitions, missiles have to be encompassed by this as well. But second one is the critical importance of allies because neither Russia nor Ukraine could have survived this long by itself or by themselves. Ukraine obviously has had the essential support from Europeans and sometimes the U.S. russia has had the vital support of China. Without its fiscal support and its tech support, Russia would have collapsed. A third one is the importance of endurance. Wars aren't short wars now last years and the Ukraine, Russia. One is a good example where the Pentagon said that Ukraine could collapse in three days and Putin would be in Kyiv. Well, no. So a country has to be prepared to supply itself, regenerate its strength for years and years, especially a small country up against a formidable larger ally, and save the most important to last. The most important lesson from Ukraine, I think, is the essential, critical central value of willpower, the sheer determination of a country, of a people, of a people, because that's what a country is. It's its people to stand and survive in the face of overwhelming odds.
- [03:55]
A
Okay, I really want to ask you about that last one. You say it's the most important, which is so interesting, because I would have thought that willpower, that the idea that that is sort of crucial to a nation's survival, doesn't that completely upend conventional understanding of a nation's most important source of power?
- [04:13]
B
It does. And that is exactly why the Pentagon got Ukraine so wrong, because they just looked at a conventional analysis. Number of missiles and fighter jets on the one team and the equivalent on the other team, and see how they match. Well, it turns out that in this case, turned out to be almost irrelevant. Not entirely, but almost irrelevant.
- [04:34]
A
So tell us, how has that actually manifested that the willpower is what's enabled Ukraine to defy the Kremlin for so long against really all expectations?
- [04:44]
B
Well, a couple of examples. When the invasion began, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians rushed to volunteer. Hundreds of thousands. Now, of course, eventually they pretty quickly had to turn to conscription. The Russians, too, of course. The Russians have been signing up prisoners and mercenaries and North Koreans and anybody they can get their hands on simply to field enough troops. But the contrast with the Russians is stark. Nobody in Russia wants to fight. And one manifestation of that is that the Russians commonly use something called blocking troops. Blocking troops are the Russian soldiers who stand behind the front lines with their guns, ready to shoot any Russian soldiers who try to retreat. Right. So they're desperately, you know, trying to prevent their own soldiers from running away. Of course, the Ukrainians have some problems with people who don't want to be. Don't want to go to the war and all of that. Any population would. But in the Russian case, it's structural. It's endemic. And according to Zelensky, the Russians are signing up about 40,000 new fighters a month, of whom 35,000 are becoming either casualties, either injured or killed. So they're just churning through these people, and nobody wants to be the next into the mincemeat machine, the Ukrainians. The will to fight is much greater. Partly, you could partly attribute that to the fact that Ukraine's survival is under threat, Russia's isn't. And that gives a more desperate edge to the Ukrainian defenders. But really this national overwhelming whole of nation commitment to this cause, starting from the leader, you'll remember, Zelenskyy, I don't need a ride, I need ammo. All the way down to, you know, people who can't fight but support the war effort in a thousand different ways.
- [06:41]
A
Okay, so let's talk about this idea that Ukraine has this whole of nations support for the defense of its country. I guess broadly speaking, how does that apply to our security here in Australia? Like what do we have to learn from that?
- [06:55]
B
What we have to learn is what all complacent western democracies are beginning to appreciate and that is that we need to change. We are completely unprepared. The realization started earlier in Europe. Half a dozen European countries are now resuming some form of military service, not conscription, but some element of requirement on younger people across Europe to participate in the defence of their countries. Just today in Canada, the Globe and Mail, which is one of the leading papers, has a piece saying Canada might have to fight an all out war. Are young Canadians prepared? And of course the answer is no. But it's the same across all the western democracies that have sheltered under American protection and alliances since World War II and now realising they're on their own.
- [07:48]
A
So I guess tell us what is the state then of our people, our collective whole, our psyche, our mental preparedness, or thinking about how we would endure against a larger predator? Because essentially that's what you're saying, Ukraine, you know, they may be tiny, they're against a nation that has nuclear weapons. How are we going here Peter?
- [08:06]
B
Not so well. Two recent polling illustrations, there was a poll, 2024 by the IPA, the Institute for Public affairs, which found that about half of Australians would be prepared to fight in the event of a war, an attack on their country and 30% would leave the country. Last year the Lowy Institute asked similar question and had a very similar answer. I think 52% of Australians said they would be prepared to fight if they were physically capable of doing so. And about 25% said they wouldn't. And the rest were in the don't know category. I suppose the threat seems too abstract from our daily lives. It's difficult to imagine. But this brings us to the critical importance of leadership, of a country's leadership preparing its people for potential crisis. It needn't be a full scale invasion. The prospect of a Full scale invasion of Australia for example, is close to zero. But we can certainly have our national survival threatened. And if our rivals succeed, destroyed, we can lose our national sovereignty and self determination quite easily through for example, one that's Australian war planners have been gaming for in recent years and that is a naval blockade of Australia so that we can't export or import anything other than what the rival in this illustrative case obviously is China, which has already tried to use trade coercion and political coercion. Why not step it up a notch? They've been practicing a naval blockade against Taiwan in recent months. Australia is not, there's absolutely no reason why we would be exempt. So threats can be real yet not obvious. And that means the leader, the leadership, the political class has a duty to prepare its citizens for a crisis, any plausible crisis. And we haven't even addressed the basics of national resilience. The fact that the country still only has about a month stockpile of fuel to keep cars running, to keep jets flying, to keep ships floating, moving. This long standing problem that Australia has known about and yet has failed to address. Pharmaceuticals. We run out of pharmaceuticals within six to 12 months. So anything you depend on to support, you know, your health and life we would lose access to. So there's a whole raft of national resilience tasks that remain untouched. Not because the government hasn't been told and not because the government doesn't know. It's the Albanese government's own Defence Strategic Review just a couple of years ago found that Australia needed, quote, a whole of nation approach to national survival. That whole of nation attitude and preparation that the government's Defence Strategic Review proposed remains in the Defence Strategic Review and has gone no further.
- [11:15]
A
Well, that's right and as you pointed out in your piece, you said, you know, that's where it remains. We're not having these hard conversations. So why aren't we having these hard conversations? Like you said, the government pointed this out, I think it's three years ago now in that Defence Strategic Review set it out very clearly. Why aren't we having these conversations, Peter?
- [11:35]
B
Well, there's the $64 billion question. The first, I would say is that in general there's a reluctance in democratic countries for governments to disturb the population with unpleasant or difficult thoughts. They much prefer to governments reassure. Oppositions are happy to sow discontent and alarm, but governments want to reassure. The second thing is the Liberal Party in recent years under Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton did try to ring the alarm. Now they might have overdone It a touch. There might have been a touch of hysteria about it because they thought it would serve their purposes against the Labor Party, but the lesson that they took from it, and the reason they've now fallen not completely silent, but largely quiet on this, is that it didn't work for them. It backfired electorally. There are five seats in the Australian Federal Parliament where the Chinese Australian population is 20% or more. And the Liberal Party used to have most of them. It lost all of them over the last two elections. And the reason seems to be alarm at the Liberal Party's loud banging of the cymbal and the implied division, the wedge that drove between Australia and China and putting Australian Chinese in an uncomfortable position. So the electoral lesson for the Liberals was, whoa, we can't do that anymore. And labor has simply learned from that that it should do the same and simply reassure the Chinese Australian population. Byproduct of that is it doesn't upset Beijing. Xi Jinping remains, shall we say, in the more passive phase in relations with Australia, the Federal Government, Albanese calls it stabilization. Well, you can only be so stable sitting on the top of a volcano because one day that volcano will erupt. But it's not this day, and Albanese is happy to take that
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A
after the break.
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B
You've got all that going on and yet at the top they prefer not to worry anybody. They don't want to create any anxiety. They certainly don't want to lose those vital Chinese Australian seats.
- [14:03]
A
I wanted to ask you, what would it take for our Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, to start having these conversations to signal to our nation? Going to be to our detriment. We don't know when, but it's going to be to our detriment if we don't start talking about the fact that we may not always be enjoying this peace and security that we've had for, you know, since the end of the Cold War? Because we spoke before recording, Peter, and you said that, you know, Anthony Albanese has been, if anything, defending China's, you know, recent sort of naval actions off our coast. So tell us a bit about that as opposed to sort of taking a hard line. He's really not been taking a hard line. Right?
- [14:40]
B
Well, that's right. So that Chinese naval task force that circumnavigated Australia and conducted live fire exercises off Sydney, that was the first time China had ever done such a thing. Albanese did say that Australia would have preferred some notice of that. But rather than criticise it for what it obviously was, which was an attempt to intimidate Australia and an attempt to lay claim to demonstrate that it has the military reach and the political intent of dominating the entire region, which has been in its leaders speeches for years by the way. But this was a very, very real and concrete manifestation of that rhetoric. Rather than criticise it, Anthony Albanese made excuses for it and said, oh, we conduct similar exercises in the South China Sea all the time. But given Australia has a presence from time to time in the South China Sea, its location is hinted at there by the title of the sea that we engage in activities that are lawful. This activity took place outside of our, our exclusive economic zone. Notification did occur of this event. What we have done is make representation saying that we think best practice would be to give more notice. And we've done that. So in other words, drawing an equivalence. It's an equivalence that doesn't exist because the South China Sea is the world's most important strategic artery where multiple countries have been conducting freedom of navigation operations for decades. And that freedom of navigation is under active threat because of the Chinese government's territorial claims and ambitions and realizing those by reclaiming islands, building military bases on them and all the rest. There is no, there is no threat to, I don't know, Australia's Antarctic roots. There is no global shipping vital lifeline that passes, you know, between Adelaide and Buenos Aires. There is no such thing stake and there is no such threat. So it's not equivalent in any way, shape or form. And yet the Prime Minister was going to some lengths to explain that we should think of it as such.
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A
So would you go so far as to say that our Prime Minister has been weak sort of globally I guess in comparison with other countries in the way they're perhaps building up or signaling to their nations that we are in a new era now and we need to prepare ourselves. You know, I'm thinking of the announcement that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney just made on February 16th announcing that Canada was launching its first ever industrial defence strategy, saying Canada is investing $180 billion in defence procurement, $290 billion in defense and security related infrastructure. And you know, he was talking about how defending Canada means more than just increasing the size of our military, it's the strength of the industries and the resilience of the economy. I guess something perhaps approaching that whole of nation attitude you were talking about. And I'm just wondering, you know, what signal that might have sent Canadians as opposed to say the signal that our Prime Minister is sending to us.
- [17:52]
B
Yeah, well that's not A bad point, because in Australia the federal government is doing a similar thing with defence industrial capability, building it up, increasing the number of products that Australia can manufacture. Autonomous underwater vehicles, aerial vehicles and land vehicles with some lethality. Long range missile production will start in Australia for the first time this year. And of course the signature is Aukus. So if you've got all of those expenses going on, tens of billions in the case of Aukus, over 50 years, hundreds of billions, doesn't that tell you that the government is actually concerned? And the official position is that four years ago we had federal governments telling us that window of warning of imminent crisis was 10 years. Well, that was four years ago.
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A
What about imminent crisis? You're referring there to China possibly attacking Taiwan.
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B
Yes, yes, unspecified. But a military security crisis directly affecting Australia. So it could encompass Taiwan, but it could encompass many others. So you've got all that going on and yet at the top they prefer not to worry anybody. They don't want to create any anxiety. They certainly don't want to lose those vital Chinese Australian seats that they love to privately will gloat about. Publicly they dismiss it as a particular target, but that's a reality. The Canadian situation, Mark Carney can and probably must be more outspoken about it because Canada has been punched in the face by the US Directly threatened right on its border.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Trump has made a rhetorical claim to own and occupy all of Canada.
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A
Yes. So it's a different situation for sure.
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B
So they've got, they've got the crisis on their doorstep, looming over them and threatening them. We don't have anything like that. And maybe that's what it will take an external crisis to drive the change in rhetoric and change in threat perception among the Australian people. Mind you, I should give, you know, some recognition that the Australian public isn't totally ignorant and distracted. The Lowy Institute polls, which is an annual poll about Australians attitudes to the rest of the world for several years now, have found around 70% of Australians believe that China will be a military threat to Australia within 20 years, I think is the question. So, you know, they're not entirely complacent or absent minded. They read the tea leaves, they can see the building threat, but you won't catch the Prime Minister talking about it.
- [20:41]
A
Okay, we'll definitely watch that space sort of scenario. But Peter, I guess just to wrap up, what would you say to listeners who are listening to us and they're thinking, hey, we're not under threat and is China really going to attack Taiwan, which would then embroil US in sort of, you know, possibly a violent conflict. You know, they might point to recent analysis showing that China's own economy would tank if it were to attack Taiwan because there'd be this loss of, you know, the high end computer chips that are made in Taiwan that, yes, all of us rely on for our defense and our phones and everything else. But actually so much of China's own economy, of course, relies on. So what if they think of all this and they go, is this conversation alarmist?
- [21:22]
B
Well, I would simply point them to a couple of facts. One of the lessons that we can draw from Ukraine is that not to listen to tactical denials by a potential rival, but look at their grand strategic narrative. Because Russia said, oh, no, Putin said, no, of course we're not going to invade Ukraine right until the day before it did. And because most countries don't want war, most countries don't want to be invaded. People are beguiled by that. And listen to that. He's not going to attack. And the Ukrainians didn't really believe that Putin was about to invade. And the Americans were telling them for weeks, we think they're coming for you. We think it's really serious. And the Ukrainians were saying, no, we don't believe that. So don't believe the denials. But the thing you can believe is the broad strategic narrative that these dictators, these predator nations tell about national greatness and their return to their former glory and their imperial glory and all of that, because that tells you the real story. The denials are just a tactical part of waging warfare on your country. The grand strategic narrative of Russia is, as we know from Putin, it's this nostalgic great Slavic empire, which is essentially a pitch to restore the Soviet Union imperial reach and rebuild a superpower. The same with China. Xi Jinping's. His most famous catchphrases are to create the China dream, to create the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. It's like Trump's Make America Great Again. So they're the grand strategic narratives. Countries have been warned. Ukraine didn't think Russia was serious until the day it happened. I would say to anybody who thinks we're being alarmist, two things. First, read the news. Second, are you feeling lucky?
- [23:14]
A
Are you feeling lucky? Yeah. Well, better to end there. Peter, thanks so much for your time.
- [23:20]
B
Always a pleasure.
- [23:26]
A
In other news today, the nation's peak veterans organization is calling for authorities to urgently resolve outstanding war crimes allegations against Australian soldiers who served in Afghanistan, arguing delays are sapping morale and unfairly smearing those who have served in uniform. Victorian public school parents fork out the most cash for their schools in the country and the second most per student. Highlighting concerns, parents are propping up a fall in government funding, and the Reserve bank is under increasing pressure to consider a rate rise before the next federal budget in May, after new figures showed inflation growing through the start of the year. For all these stories, go to our websites@theaid.com au or smh.com Today's episode was produced by Chee Wong. Our executive producer is Tammy Mills, and our podcasts are overseas by Lisa Muxworthy and Tom McKendrick. If you like our show, follow the Morning Edition and leave a review for us on Apple or Spotify. Thanks for listening.
- [24:39]
B
Jack Harndale was helping his daughter Emily
- [24:41]
A
lift an awkward dresser up a staircase when he slipped and fell backwards. A week later, Emily asked him how he was doing.
- [24:48]
B
I'm good.
- [24:49]
A
Truth was, he wasn't good. Jack needed help. Then the darndest thing happened.
- [24:54]
B
Emily called Pacific Source my health plan.
- [24:58]
A
Jack learned that Pacific Source provides members with support beyond health care. In Jack's case, we got him in
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B
touch with the local food bank. You guys do that? Yes, we do, Jack. Pacific Source Health Plan.