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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. I'm Alex Dibble and I executive produce the podcast. The World in 10 is partnered with Frontline, the interview series from Times Radio, available on YouTube, with expert analysis of the world's conflicts. At the weekend, we bring you Frontline interviews in full. Here's one from this week. I hope you find it interesting.
Hello and welcome to Frontline for Times Radio. I'm James Hansen. And today we're talking about the latest on the war in Ukraine. And I'm delighted to be joined from Kiev by the Times' defence correspondent, George Grylls. George, always a pleasure. Welcome back. Good morning. Thanks for having me. First of all, as someone who's been in Ukraine over recent days, and obviously you've been in the country a fair bit since the full-scale invasion began, sum up the mood in Ukraine now compared to your previous visits.
It's a bit of an odd time because obviously we're over a month on from the election of Donald Trump and that completely changes the international picture. But domestically, it's still taking time, I would feel, for Ukrainians to kind of
accept these threats from Trump, that they're going to withdraw aid, that there's going to be peace talks. You know, this is a country that's been at war for almost three years, really now, over two and a half years. And the idea that it's going to stop overnight is just not something that they're kind of considering at the moment, I would say, from the mood on the street. And, you know, early on this trip, I went to a cemetery on the outskirts of Kiev to kind of
Speak to bereaved families, because if anyone has a stake in what peace looks like in Ukraine, it's them, people who have sacrificed their loved ones, you know, to this war.
And their responses were really interesting. I mean, firstly, when you go to these places, the sheer scale of the death is just extraordinary and moving. And this was, in fact, where we were in the cemetery was basically an overflow section. But speaking to the families, they said...
Our loved ones have died. There was one woman whose son had died during the 2023 counteroffensive when Ukraine was trying to take, or basically trying to thrust down to the Black Sea, cut the Russians in two and liberate all their occupied territory. And that obviously failed. And for her, a year on from that, still absorbing the pain, but also a peace deal where Ukraine sacrifices everything
Donetsk and Luhansk and occupied parts of Kherson and all this territory in eastern Ukraine would also mean recognising that perhaps people who died liberating these things, that their sacrifice, at least for now, was in vain, that they can't win back these lands. And Zelensky is already talking about concession on the basis that
that militarily speaking, Ukraine is unlikely to be able to liberate this territory. But saying it out loud, saying we're not getting this back and for people to realise that, that's a big step.
Yeah, it's a really interesting point you raise. We'll come back to the issue of potential peace talks in due course. Just first, you visited recently Dnipro, which of course was the scene of that a Russian missile attack by the Russians a few weeks back. But you were also there to look at the prospective Ukrainian ballistic missile program. So tell us a bit about what you learned.
Well, I think the kind of common consensus after that strike was this was a message to the West. This was Russia trying to reassert its deterrence by saying, look, look at all these medium range ballistic missiles we have in our arsenal. We can very well hit European capitals as well, not least.
the American cities with intercontinental ballistic missiles. That was the common consensus. This was a message for the West, particularly in response to those storm shadow and attack strikes into Russia. But I think we were underplaying what they targeted and why they targeted and that this was simultaneously a message to the Ukrainians.
So the Russians decided to hit Pivtenmash, which was known as Yuzhmash in the Soviet Union. And it was basically the center of missile building in the Soviet Union. So when you think of the...
for example, the Satan intercontinental ballistic missile that the Soviet Union could kind of wipe out New York or Los Angeles with. And they developed this technology in the 1960s. This was all built by Ukrainian engineers. This was built in Ukraine. And so they have a long legacy of building
very powerful ballistic missiles. Obviously, that fell into disrepair. At the end of the Soviet Union, the missile orders dried up. The factory remained and there was still the expertise. They weren't building these missiles. Now, Zelensky has, as well as kind of building up a long-range drone program, so they want to build 30,000 long-range drones next year that will be able to hit Moscow, they want to supplement that with
building a domestic ballistic missile, one that would not require Western permissions. It would allow Ukraine to hit Ukraine
given the kind of reputed range of what this missile would be. And that would, if you think about in the context of a possible peace deal, if Ukraine is not going to get NATO, what sort of deterrence can it build up? And having, you know, a combination of kamikaze drones and a few ballistic missiles that could hit Moscow, that's another way of making Putin think twice. So what I was doing in Dnipro was trying to kind of
Look into how feasible is it that Ukraine can build at least a few ballistic missiles or enough to deter a third Russian invasion if there is a peace or some sort of temporary ceasefire coming next year. And with Pivton Mash, I think I'm right in saying the Russians claim they had essentially destroyed it. Is that true?
No, it's rubbish, as most things spouted by the Kremlin are. I mean, it's a huge, huge site, firstly. And the Russians have tried to hit it many times before. And so if you drive around it, you can see the...
scarring on the buildings you can see windows blown out on several of them but it's massive and um you know if you speak to people the residents of Dnipro I mean at one stage the factory alone employed one in three families in the city so it just every almost anyone you speak to on the street will have some sort of family connection if not friends who work there
And they'll tell you that it was designed during the Cold War as one of the Soviet Union's most strategic sites to survive potentially American nuclear weapons and the rest of it. It is not built to be wiped out by a singular ballistic missile.
it seems most probably that there is some sort of subterranean, um, workshops there, um, that, that, that they're pretty confident it's not going to get hit. Um,
And, you know, can survive strikes such as the Ereshnik one. So, no, I mean, judging by the fact that there were cars pulling in and out, even though you could see that the windows were blown out for all these different missile strikes, I think it's very much operational. So as far as we're aware, the Ukrainian ballistic missile program is continuing pretty much unaffected.
Well, we haven't had an update since the Ereshnik strike, but given that the damage that seems to have been done by it was fairly minimal, and just before the strike, Zelensky had confirmed there had been a successful test of this ballistic missile, which is called Khrym-Dua, which means Thunder 2, it seems pretty unlikely. Yeah.
Do we know how many ballistic missiles Ukraine wants to be able to produce? I mean, you can see the incentive, as you say, if they don't have to have permission from the US or the UK in order to fire them in the way they do for the attack of the storm shadows, you can absolutely see the incentive. But do we know how many they want to build?
They haven't said that yet, but I would say the mass comes more from the drone program. Same as what Russia is doing to Ukraine nightly across the country, which is you send, well, in Russia's case, usually over 100 drones per day.
you know, attacking from various different angles to try and kind of overwhelm the air defenses, confuse them. And then you send a smaller number of ballistic missiles, which are the ones that are really going to do the damage. So, yeah,
I guess what Ukraine is trying to do is build up an arsenal that mirrors Russia's own and means that Moscow is not immune from this war. And how worried do you think Vladimir Putin will be about the Ukrainian ballistic missile programme, especially when you consider that it was a Neptune anti-ship missile that sunk the Moskva, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet? So, you know, Ukraine does have some form here. Yeah, he can't afford to underestimate Ukrainian production, and that's why.
they targeted Pivitin Mash. I think, you know, there is, there was a logic to sending a message there, which is basically, you know, if you may be building a missile, but look how many we've got and look at, look at the newest one that we've just made. So, um, definitely he'll be concerned. I mean, bear in mind the, um,
the utterly farcical premise for beginning, or one of the premises for building the wall was, you know, the beginning of the war was that Ukraine was going to host nuclear weapons and all, and Western ballistic missiles and all this rubbish. Well, it's kind of backfired if he ends up with Ukraine building its own. Yeah. And just finally on the missiles, do we know how many they might need in order to, with the, you know, combined with the drones to overwhelm Moscow's air defences?
It's an unknowable question until you put it into practice, really, isn't it? I mean, put it this way, with a few drones, they've managed to actually hit Moscow. So we don't know the effectiveness of Russian air defenses. But, you know, Russia has a huge stockpile of missiles. So...
It seems unlikely that it's going to totally alter the power balance and suddenly Ukraine is able to kind of go tit for tat for every strike the Russians hit Kiev, they can hit Moscow in return. It's unlikely they're ever going to kind of balance it out like that. But, you know, it just requires a few signature attacks to kind of make Putin think twice. I mean, put it this way, if he himself sitting in the Kremlin is suddenly in range of,
ballistic missiles that makes you a little bit more nervous about it
about making decisions about, for example, if they launched a third invasion and had another crack at Kiev. Let's come on to some of the geopolitics around the war. First of all, to what extent are people in Ukraine picking up on what's been happening in Syria and a sense that Vladimir Putin has been fundamentally weakened by the fall of the Assad regime? Oh, I mean, there's undoubted joy at seeing Russian troops kind of, you know, pack up their flags and...
head back to Moscow. I think there were even suggestions that the Ukrainian special forces might have been involved in helping some of the Syrian rebels. And they've done similar stuff in Africa. So they're well known for doing a bit of kind of muckraking and causing the Russians trouble abroad as well as here. So yeah, I think there's a kind of vicarious thrill in
seeing these Syrian rebels overrun Damascus and take out one of Russia's key allies in the Middle East. Well, Russia's single biggest ally in the Middle East, arguably. Yeah, and it is interesting because we've got this backdrop of potential peace talks in the new year and Donald Trump, of course, returning to the White House. And it's interesting because at the moment it appears as if Zelensky is more prepared to get around the negotiating table than
than Vladimir Putin is. And I wonder how people in Ukraine are feeling about the return of Donald Trump, George, because my sense was, you know, maybe six months ago, there was genuine concern about what a second Trump presidency may mean. And those concerns haven't entirely gone away. But potentially, there is less pessimism than there once was about what it may mean for Ukraine. Is that your sense speaking to people in Ukraine?
I think they can take hope from the fact that he is an unpredictable politician. And I spoke to Dmitry Kuleba, who was Ukraine's foreign minister until September. And he was stressing, you know, Trump does what suits him in the here and now. And the political situation in the US means that he has to
satisfy the electorate's concerns that American taxpayers' money is not being sent down the drain in Ukraine. And so he is kind of talking a tough line on that. But suddenly, if he does cut off aid and it all goes south for Ukraine next year and the front lines collapse and the Russians are advancing, maybe they're threatening Zaporizhzhia, maybe they're even threatening further into Ukraine.
Trump does not want a a Kabul style capitulation. You know, that is the that was one of those moments when he really went for Biden. He doesn't like losers as the as the as he frequently puts it. And.
If America sees Ukraine fundamentally threatened, in Kuleba's view, Trump's domestic opinion could well shift in America, and Trump may be forced to act at that point. So just because now he's saying we're going to cut off aid, that doesn't necessarily mean that changing what happens here forces him to reassess.
And also, I think we consistently underestimate just how effective a politician Vladimir Zelensky is when it comes to, you know, charming other world leaders and making the case for Ukraine. I mean, not only is he going on a lot of US podcasts at the moment, but he also, of course, is on Charm Offensive with Donald Trump. And we saw them in Notre Dame, for instance. Meanwhile, you have Vladimir Putin sanctioning the use of naked footage of Melania Trump on Facebook.
Kremlin TV around the election. Very different approaches to dealing with Donald Trump. And Trump, I sense, is sensitive to the accusation that he is some kind of poodle for Putin. Yeah, but bear in mind as well, just as a counter narrative that, you know, Putin sent a pretty warm message after the election welcoming Trump into place. And then if you look at what Viktor Orban has been saying, and Orban is a kind of
friendly with both sides. He's trying to broker this kind of Christmas truce, kind of First World War style, you know, meet in the middle of no man's land and play a game of football. And that's been batted away by Zelensky pretty comprehensively. But, you know, Trump's team has kind of suggested that that's not a terrible idea. Perhaps Orban is kind of expressing a view from Moscow as well. So,
Yeah, it's... And I think the Hungarian role is important.
given that, you know, Orbán has travelled quite a lot to Mar-a-Lago. I think he went twice before the election, made it very clear who he wanted to be president. He's also gone to see Putin. And you have to say there is a reason why Hungary is doing all this, which is that Hungary is still buying quite a lot of Russian gas and that Russian gas transits Ukraine. So throughout the war, there's a pipeline which actually...
begins in suzha which is the town that the ukrainians have taken on the russian side and it crosses the entirety of ukraine and this pipeline has continued to carry gas to countries like austria and hungary and give them cheap gas and actually ukraine is about to once this agreement ends on the first of january ukraine has said it's not going to renew it so um
Orban is under direct threat from the war continuing next year and Ukraine threatening to turn off the taps, which they control, basically, because it means that suddenly his voters are going to have a much more expensive time of heating their home and all the rest of it. So there's a reason why he's keen to act as an intermediary. But he does have the ear of Trump and he does have the ear of Putin. So he's an influential character in these talks.
Yeah, it's a really interesting point you raised there. Just on your interview, you mentioned with Dmytro Kaleba, the former Ukrainian foreign minister. What else did he say about Western support for Ukraine at the moment?
Well, he was very interesting. I mean, one of the last acts that he was involved in as foreign minister was over the question of using Western missiles to hit Russian territory. And that was obviously about Storm Shadows, British, well, Anglo-French missiles, and also attacking these American ballistic missiles. And he was very interesting.
I mean, he said the first kind of unpleasant, was the word he used, conversation he had with his British counterparts was over storm shadows and where they were allowed to be used because he felt that the new Labour government was not leading the world on this decision. Now, if you reflect back...
to previous moments when Russia said, if you do this, we will annihilate Europe with our nuclear weapons. Or if you do that, then we're going to send a nuclear tsunami over Britain, all these sorts of threats. They have come, for example, when the West was debating whether or not to send tanks to Ukraine, whether or not to give long range missiles to Ukraine. And Britain was the country that
did all these things first. Now, what it didn't do was supply volume. If you look at the total amounts of goods given, the US and Germany has given far more. But just by giving 14 Challenger IIs, which is a pretty small amount and is not going to tilt the balance on the battlefield, diplomatically, it had an outsized effect because it essentially embarrassed the US and Germany into taking action too, because it proved to them that
Russia was just making stuff up about how this was going to trigger a huge reaction. So the Ukrainians have treasured their relationship with Britain, specifically because Britain has a large appetite for risk and will take decisions ahead of Germany and the US that then unblock
unlock a kind of wider agreement on where the kind of, where the threshold of escalation lies. But in the first decision that the Labour government was faced with, they decided
basically backed away from something that was controversial. And they said, no, we're not going to allow Ukraine to use storm shadows to strike Russia until we get American approval. So it was the opposite to what had happened before, which is that Britain leads the way and the Americans follow in greater numbers and very effectively.
At this point, it was Britain saying, we'll wait until the US does it and then we'll follow wherever they go. And for Kuleba, that is a key plank in Ukrainian diplomacy being removed if Britain is unwilling under this new government to take a risk. Now, I think it's probably related to the domestic politics in Britain of what happens to defence spending in the UK. And that is important.
you know, that's a tricky one for politicians across Europe. And again, Kaleva was making the point that, you know, all politicians in Berlin and Paris and London and the kind of major capsules of defence in Europe have been reading for two and a half years. It's pretty...
apocalyptic intelligence briefings and warnings from their military commanders about the real possibility of, you know, further aggression from Russia and the need to spend more on defence. But they are...
Overall, seemingly, given that there's been no massive rise in defence spending in Western Europe, I'm discounting Poland, for example, and the Baltic states, which have done a huge amount to kind of rearm. But there is a reluctance to confront the electorate, to tell the electorate,
Maybe you aren't going to have to spend more on taxes. Maybe we are going to have to prioritise money away from the NHS in Britain or other huge public services and spend more on defence. And to be fair to the Labour government, they've inherited a serious...
They've inherited this decision, which was basically kicked into long grass by the Conservatives. But I think that support for Ukraine is tied to that because you're going to be less willing to take a risk if you...
if you're not sure that you're going to be able to kind of spend enough on defence to keep your deterrence at a high level. Yeah, and I suppose it goes back to, you know, Donald Trump coming in and one of the points he's made consistently, he made it in his first term with NATO, is he wants to see other NATO countries increase their deterrence
defence spending commitments and at the very least meet the 2% target and probably go higher as well as he enters his second term. And potentially, if he is going to continue arming Ukraine in any way, shape or form, he will only do it in exchange for Europe upping its contribution. Right. And now, you know, you've got Mark Rutter as the new NATO General Secretary, and they're sort of talking about
3% as a potential new target. And that is going to be really uncomfortable for Keir Starmer's government. If NATO suddenly say the new target is 3%, he said, we want to get to 2.5%, but we're not sure when we're going to do it.
Well, 3% suddenly adds billions and billions to the bill for UK taxpayers, which is why you might be reluctant to address these sorts of questions. So Kuleba was interested. I mean, obviously, once you're out of office, you're a bit freer to kind of speak your mind. But, you know, the way in which he was suggesting that, you know, there is a...
that European policies are basically too timid to go against the polling that shows, you know, there's lack of appetite to kind of divert money away from hospitals or whatever, other public service, police or other public services towards the military. And so, yeah, I thought that was an interesting point that he was making. Yeah.
And just finally, George, as we enter 2025 almost, what do you see as the big questions for the next 12 months in this war? I mean, it really does depend on what happens once Trump comes in. The Ukraine, if it is going to continue to fight, how does it keep getting the manpower to the front lines? You know, I spoke to
I was in Sumi and speaking to some new recruits who had just been called up. You know, they had been basically stopped in the street and told to go and fight. And, you know, these are people or these were people who were in their 40s and 50s. These are not kind of, you know,
fit young men rearing to go. We've gone through that by this stage. So how does Ukraine keep up with Russia's seemingly endless ability to keep sending troops to the front? And then I guess the main question for Russia is what sort of
relationship will Putin and Trump have? How will those talks go? And are they prepared to stop? And what is the price of them preparing to stop? Because Putin's already set out his
opening bid, which is that he wants not just all the occupied territory. He wants also the city of Zaporizhia. He wants Ukrainian troops to retreat from the front lines. And he wants a cast-iron commitment that Ukraine never joins NATO. And all those things are just non-starters, really. So...
what might they be prepared to settle for to end the war? Or maybe they just don't want to end the war. And at the moment, you know, that looks like the likely option. And as much as Trump has said that he wants to do these negotiations within 24 hours, you know, end the war within a day of entering the White House, when you actually drill down into the detail...
there is a huge chasm between the two sides and it's hard to see where an agreement comes from it. George, we always appreciate your time. Thank you so much for joining us again on Frontline. Cheers, James. Thank you.
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