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The New Yorker Radio Hour
A Year of the War in Ukraine
00:30:21
In the year since Russia’s invasion, Ukrainians have shown incredible fortitude on the battlefield. Yet an end to the conflict seems nowhere in sight. “Putin’s strategy could be defined as ‘I can’t have it—nobody can have it.’ And, sadly, that’s where the tragedy is right now,” Stephen Kotkin, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a scholar of Russian history, tells David Remnick. “Ukraine is winning in the sense that [it] didn’t allow Russia to take that whole country. But it’s losing in the sense that its country is being destroyed.” Kotkin says that the standards for a victory laid out by President Volodymyr Zelensky set an impossibly high bar, and that Ukraine—however distasteful the prospect—may be forced to cut its losses. He suggests it could accept its loss of control over some of its territory while aiming to secure expedited accession to the European Union, and still consider this a victory. Remnick also speaks with Sevgil Musaieva, the thirty-five-year-old editor-in-chi...
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
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Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Being a journalist in Ukraine has never been an easy matter. In fact, it's been extremely dangerous over the years. Two editors of Ukrainska Pravda, Ukrainian Truth, have been murdered over time, possibly by corrupt authorities. Sevgil Moiseeva became the editor in chief in 2014 when she was just in her 20s. How are you?
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Good, good actually.
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Where are you?
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I'm not in my newsroom today. I came to like business trip to Odessa. Yeah, I'm staying in a hotel now, just to have a WI fi connection and everything.
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So.
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Moiseva is from Crimea, which Russia invaded and illegally annexed in 2014 after Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine. Just a year ago, she started an English language edition of Ukrainska Pravda, intending to bring news of the war to more readers in the West. I talked with Sevgia Moiseva last week about what it's meant to run a newsroom in a time of war this past year, while destruction of every kind has engulfed her country. I want to get a sense of the morale of your newsroom, your virtual newsroom of Ukrainska Pravda and at the same time the morale of people around you. Talk to me about what's changed over the course of a year.
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This is so interesting. A good friend of mine, Vladimir Yermolinko, who is a philosopher, in his interview to our newspaper he told like the most important thing, that it's not. Of course everyone speaks now about Ukrainian resistance, but there are a lot of people who were broken by this war. And in my newsroom even there are a lot of people who affected by this war in terrible way because they lost their parents. For example, one of my colleague father was killed in Bucha in March. Another my colleague, she lost his father because her father became a soldier and he just disappeared. And then we understood that he probably was killed in the front line. One of my colleague joined the army. The experience of this war is unique for everyone and everyone reflects and everyone survives this war in his personal way. In my personal way I also go through this war.
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How do you keep the spirits of the staff of Ukrainskaya Pravda in any way healthy?
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So difficult question because you know, we have some offices around country and I have even opportunity to travel abroad for my staff, for example, but they don't want to. So we have our office, for example, in Chernivtsi and I, I'm literally asking every single day, I ask every single day, my colleagues, please, could you just travel, work from this place? And they don't want to. They want to stay in Kiev. They want to stay in our office, even with blackouts, with everything. And if you ask me, are they exhausted? Of course they are. I heard from my editorial staff a lot of stories about their dreams, about their phobias. And I mentioned before that my colleagues lost their parents, their loved ones. And I asked them to tell the story about it, like the best way how to survive during your trauma and how to go through this trauma. I think that it's about writing. And I asked them just to share their thoughts, and we published those stories.
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A year has passed, and as we know, the war certainly did not go as Vladimir Putin had expected. And yes, it's absolutely true that Putin has recklessly sent in many, many Russian troops who are inexperienced, untrained, and get killed very quickly. But he doesn't seem to care. He doesn't seem to care how much goes into the meat grinder, whether it's his own people, much, much less Ukrainians. Is time on your side, on Ukraine's side, or is it on Russia's side?
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It's not on our side. Because every single life for Ukraine matters. And every single day, Ukraine lost people and the best people in our country. We don't have a professional. It's not about professional army. You know, like a lot of my friends, they joined army and they were artists, they were journalists, they were producers in normal life. And some of them already killed. And I'm thinking about that. This producer will not produce wonderful films after that. These journalists will not write his articles. That's why everyone dreams about this war and will end as soon as possible for Ukrainian people. But at the same time, we don't want to trade our territories, we don't want to give up. We don't want to live under occupation. And that's why we are fighting. And we will fight to the end. And how much time we will need for that?
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Tell me this. A year into the war, a year into this hell, you are still a young person and running a newspaper. Can you see a world after the war? And what is the Ukraine that you see after the war? What kind of life?
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Yes, I was 17 years old when the first Orange Revolution took place in Ukraine. Then in 2014, I was like 26 years old, investigative reporter. And I investigated also misconducts of Yanukovych. And now I'm 35. And this is full scale war. You know, I dream about. Yeah, I have my personal dream to celebrate, like maybe my 50th anniversary in free Crimea together with my kids and my family. This is like a picture, how to say, idealistic picture from the future. But I do believe that this is kind of an appointment for my generation that was born in Soviet empire, and I was born in Soviet Union. I was born in Uzbekistan. And because people of my nation were terribly deported by Stalin, in order of Stalin. And then we came back to Crimea and we have to destroy this Soviet empire and like the ghost of the Soviet empire. And this is the goal of our generation, generation that like a lot of my, the people of my generation, they don't have family, they don't have kids. They just dedicate their lives and the best years of their lives to country.
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Sevgil Moiseeva is the editor in chief of the news site Ukrainskay Pravda Ukrainian Truth. You can find an english translation@pravda.comua pravda.comua now we're going to continue looking at a year of the war and Ukraine's prospects for the future. That's all coming up on the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When Russia invaded Ukraine a year ago, one of the first people I reached out to was Stephen Kotkin. Kotkin is a historian of Russia, and he's written major works on the Soviet period. And his biography of Stalin, which is in progress, is astonishing. He's written two volumes of a projected three. He's also extremely active in looking at current geopolitical questions. Kotkin and I spoke in March of 2022, and I talked with him again the other day to get a long view of Putin's campaign of destruction, what it's done to Ukraine, what it's done to Russia, and how this war can possibly end. Stephen, last year you told me at an early stage of the war that Ukraine was winning the war. Only on Twitter, but that Russia was winning the war on the battlefield. A lot has happened since then. But is that still the case?
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Unfortunately. Let's think of a house. Let's say that you own a house and it has 10 rooms. And let's say that I barge in and take two of those rooms away and I wreck those rooms, and from those two rooms, I'm wrecking your other eight rooms. And you're trying to beat me back. You're trying to evict me from the two rooms. But I'm still there and I'm still wrecking. And the thing is, is you need your house. That's where you live. Maybe it's not a perfect house, but it's your house. And you don't have another house. Me, I've got another house. So I don't actually need yours. And so if I wreck your house, are you winning or am I winning? And so, unfortunately, that's the situation we're in. Ukraine has beaten back the Russian attempt to conquer their country. They have defended their capital. They've pushed the Russians out of some of the land that the Russians conquered since February 24, 2022, about half of it. They've regained the Ukrainians. And yet they need their house and the Russians are wrecking it. So like I said from the beginning, Putin's strategy could be described as, I can't have it, nobody can have it. And sadly, that's where the tragedy is right now.
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I know assessing the thinking of a dictator from this distance and with minimal to no sources is a very difficult thing to do, but how do you even begin to analyze Putin as a strategic figure in this horrendous drama?
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So he's not a strategic figure. People kept saying he was a tactical genius, he was playing a weak hand. Well. And I kept telling people, seriously, how does that work? This is prior to the war. And so if you look at the ingredients of what makes strategy, how you build a country's prosperity, how you build its human capital, its infrastructure, its governance, all the things that make a country successful, there was no evidence that any of the things that were attributed to his tactical genius or tactical agility were contributing in a positive way to Russia's long term power. So how is that strategic for him? What is it that he's gained? If you look over the landscape, he's hurt Russia's reputation far worse than it ever was. He consolidated the Ukrainian nation whose existence he denied. He's got Sweden applying for NATO membership. Right. If you know anything about the last 200 years or so of history, you would never thought that you would have uttered that sentence. And so all across the board, it's a disaster. The problem is he's in power, he's got a lot of assets, he can wreck other people's stuff as he's doing, and he can do worse than he's doing so far. And so it's tragic for the Ukrainians in the first instance, but it's also tragic for the Russians. He smeared that country with a criminal aggression, and so he's Wrecking his own country in a way, although in a very different way from the murdering that he's carrying out in Ukraine.
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What has been revealed about Russia's military and Russia's intelligence capabilities in the past year?
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We've had some very pleasant surprises. The war is a tragedy. There's no way to spin it is other than tragic given what's happened. The number of deaths in Ukraine, the amount of destruction, the consequences for other countries including food insecurity. But there have been some pleasant surprises. One was Ukrainians ability and will to fight. It's been very inspiring from the get go. We knew they would fight to a certain extent because they overthrew domestic dictators 2004 and 2013, 14 and so we knew that they would resist. But nonetheless, for myself as well, it's been a pleasant surprise. The depth of their courage and resistance. The other pleasant surprise has been Russia's failures. Once again, we knew that there were issues with Russia. Many of us thought that the Russian army was really only about 30,000 or 50,000 strong maximum in terms of trained fighters who had up to date kit as opposed to hundreds of thousands of dog food eating, conscript type, untrained or poorly trained, badly equipped soldiers under corrupt officers. Europe's adaptability and fortitude, right. Everybody said if Europe doesn't have its cappuccinos in the morning and it's espressos after lunch that there's no way they could put up with this. And look what's happened. They switched from their dependence on Russian energy much faster than anybody thought. They brave the winter and they've rallied in support of Ukraine pretty much across the board. Yes, there are some issues, yes, there's some domestic politics in Europe, but it's been very impressive. Then there's been what I would call an unfavorable surprise and that's the fact that the Russian economy has done really strongly despite the sanctions. Sanctions are a controversial issue. Sanctions effectiveness is often determined by how you define the effectiveness. People on both sides can define it for their own purposes to make their arguments work. But it's clear that the Russian economy didn't shrink, let alone shrink massively. It turns out that the Russian people proved extremely adaptable to the sanction regime and figured out how to survive and in some cases how to prosper so that Russian imports are back and Russian exports are back and Russian jobs. So it turns out that the sanctions are not having the effect of inflicting severe pain in the short term for sure on the Russian economy despite the the massive big Bang. Nature of the banking sanctions and some of the other things.
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Steve, last year we talked about this idea from the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, the great Chinese theorist of war, who said that you have to build your opponent a golden bridge so that he can find a way to retreat a year later. Do you have any thoughts on what that might look like? And is anybody even thinking about it at this point?
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Yeah. So that would be a great thing if we could do that, but there's nothing like that in sight. So, as we've discussed previously, you win the war on the battlefield. And the problem with the battlefield is that victory is misdefined here. You have to win on the battlefield. But how do you then win the piece as well? What would winning the piece look like? We know you can win on the battlefield and lose the peace. So here we are with Ukraine and their definition of victory as expressed by President Zelensky, who certainly more than risen to the occasion, as everybody has seen. It's completely understandable from a humanitarian point of view, given the atrocities Russia is committing. And his definition of victory is regain every inch of territory, reparations and war crimes tribunals. So how would Ukraine enact that definition of victory? They would have to take Moscow. How else can you get reparations and war crimes tribunals? Even if you can get every inch of territory, they're not that close to regaining every inch of their own territory, let alone the other aims. If you look at the American definition of what the victory might look like, we've been very hesitant. The Biden administration has been very careful to say, Ukraine is fighting, Ukrainians are dying, they get to decide. And so the Biden administration has effectively defined victory from the American point of view as Ukraine can't lose this war, Russia can't take all of Ukraine and occupy Ukraine and disappear Ukraine as a state, as a nation in the world.
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Well, that may be so, but what does Biden actually mean? What would Biden really like to see and US Intelligence and the US Military like to see in terms of a shift in attitude if that's the case?
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Well, it's slowly but surely increasing our support for Ukraine. And so we've given enough so that Ukraine doesn't lose that they can continue the battle and maybe push a little more on the battlefield, regain a little bit more territory and be in a better place to negotiate. Here's the better definition of victory. Ukrainians rose up against their domestic tyrants. Why? Because they wanted to join Europe. Their goal was to be part of Europe. It's the same goal that they have now, and that has to be the definition of victory. Ukraine gets into the eu. If Ukraine regains all of its territory and doesn't get into the eu, is that a victory? As opposed to if Ukraine regains as much of its territory as it physically can on the battlefield, not all of it, potentially, but does get EU accession, would that be a definition of victory? Of course it would be.
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Well, says you. But with the Ukrainian leadership, and the Ukrainian people accept a situation in which they're in the EU, but Donbas and Crimea remain in Russian hands.
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Well, you accept it or you don't accept it, meaning you continue to fight. And if you continue to fight, your country, your people continue to die, and your infrastructure continues to get ruined, your schools, your hospitals, your cultural artifacts get bombed or stolen, your children get taken away as orphans. That's where we are right now. If we get every inch of territory back, and we're not close to that, we still need an EU accession process. It'll need a demilitarized zone. No matter how much territory it gets back, including if it somehow gets Crimea back, it's got the problem that next year, the year after, the year after next, this could happen again.
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But I sense, Steve, I sense on the Ukrainian side, for example, the other day in the Washington Post, there was an interview with the very young head of Ukrainian intelligence. What did I get out of the interview? A sense of optimism that includes not only doing well on the battlefield, but getting back Crimea within the next year.
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Yeah, and The Russians shoot 50 Iranian drones over Ukraine and the Ukrainians shoot down 75 of them. I mean, of course, we fully understand Ukrainian intelligence has to be optimistic. He's not going to go in the Washington Post and say our chances of taking Crimea are next to zero. We're going to have another hundred thousand casualties over the course of the next year or so. Even if the tanks arrive by May or late April. He can't say stuff like that. We want it to be true because we want a shortcut to a Ukrainian victory. The problem is we have to live in the circumstances we've got. You're in a situation, David, where you have to think about not just the spring offensive, not just how many tanks we may be able to get over there. By the way, tanks in World War II averaged about four and a half days of life on the battlefield, and you need massive workshops to repair them.
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And Western patience and Western supplies is not a given for all kinds of factors having to do with various European factors. You have a Republican Congress. Now, that is not as likely to accede to Ukrainian requests as the Democratic one was, ironically, considering Cold War realities. Am I right?
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I'm not worried about resolve here. I came up with this equation early in the process, which is Ukrainian valor plus Russian atrocities equals Western unity and resolve. And it's held. But there's been a ceiling on how far we would go in assisting the Ukrainians because we don't want an escalation of direct confrontation with the Russians or Russians using some of the capabilities that Putin has that we all know about and we're right to be concerned about. People say, well, it would be irrational if Putin were to use nuclear weapons. It would be self defeating. He would just get destroyed himself in retaliation. And the answer is, from our point of view, certainly that would be really stupid. Just like this war starting. This war looks really stupid from our point of view. But here's the problem. He's got a lot of capabilities short of nuclear weapons. He could poison the water supply in Kyiv with chemical and biological weapons. He could poison the water supply in London. And then he could deny that it's his special operatives who are doing that. He can blow up the infrastructure that carries gas or other energy supplies to Europe.
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What does restrain him?
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We don't know. You tell me. When someone has these capabilities, you have to pay attention. You can't say, oh, you know, that would be crazy if he did that. That would be totally self defeating. What idiot would do that? And the answer is, okay, but what if he does it? And so we have to be concerned about escalation. And so, yes, I have been in favor of greater supply more quickly of more weapons to the Ukrainians from the beginning, but not because I'm blase about the capabilities that Russia has.
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Why are you in favor of that?
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Because I think the Ukrainians deserve the chance to try to win on the.
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Battlefield before then having to sit down and make concessions with the Russians.
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And you have to sit down across from your murderer, representatives of your murderer, and you got to do a deal where your murderer takes some of the stuff he has stolen and killed your people in the process. That's a terrible outcome, but that's an outcome which is maybe not the worst outcome. The point being that if you get EU accession, it balances the concessions you have to make. The EU is a separate problem. EU accession is a torturous undertaking. It's probably like editing 8,000 word articles for the New Yorker to wrestle them down to 3,000 words.
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I would never do that.
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There are many forms of torture. EU accession is one of them. I'm talking about a Ukrainian victory here, not a Russian victory. There are many issues with Ukraine. Their young people are in exile, going to school in Poland and other countries. Will those people come back?
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How big is the Ukrainian exile been or how many Ukrainians have left?
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We're in the millions.
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Yeah.
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We don't know exactly, but we're in the multi millions and. And that's your future. That's the future of your country. The hope is, is that it's temporary and they get them back. So you then have a reconstruction issue. Even if you win, you're wrecked. So you got to have reconstruction. You know what kind of numbers we're talking about? 350 billion is one of the numbers being tossed around.
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Who knows what today?
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Yeah, who knows what the actual number is? What was Ukrainian GDP before the war? About 180 billion. So you're talking double GDP in reconstruction funds has to somehow enter that country and not disappear, not vanish. And so you're talking double, double their pre war gdp. So for that you need functioning institutions, not wartime resistance institutions. And so Ukraine is winning in the sense of we didn't allow Russia to take that whole country, but it's losing in the sense that its country is being destroyed. And what we want is the country to be built, not destroyed, in whatever size of that country that they're able to hold on to with our material support. So let's fix the EU accession process. Right. North Macedonia is waiting longer than you wait for your doordash by a lot to get into the eu.
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I somehow think the session for Ukraine would be accelerated.
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We would have to see the EU requires some reform here. The eu, like the United States, is an imperfect institution. The problem with the eu, David, is there's no middle ground where you get partway in.
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Yeah.
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So you start the accession, you check some of the boxes and then they say great. And then you got to check more boxes and five more years go by. It's either you're in or you're not in. You can't be part in. And that's the situation in the western Balkans. We can't have that happen to Ukraine. After all the sacrifices that they've undertaken, it would be tragic if we let them down that way.
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Stephen Kotkin is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a biographer of Joseph Stalin. A longer version of our conversation appears in the New Yorker's second annual Interviews issue, which has been running online throughout the week. I'm David Remnick. And that's our program. I want to thank you for joining us.
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See you soon.
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The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbez of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado and Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Valten, Brita Green, Adam Howard, Kalalea, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell and Ingofen and Putabuele, with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Harrison Keithline and Meher Bhatia. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.