Frontline Special: Times Ukraine reporter Maxim Tucker
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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 by the Times journalist Maxim Tucker. Maxim, always a pleasure. Welcome back to Frontline. Thanks for having me again. To begin with, where would you say this war is at the moment? We've had a very monumental few weeks from a political point of view with the US election, with the approval of

Use of attack comes and storm shadows with Putin changing his nuclear doctrine and ramping up his rhetoric. Now we've got President Zelensky coming out making comments about Ukraine joining NATO in exchange for a freezing of the front lines. Where do you think this conflict is at the moment?

So it's definitely in a not good place for the Ukrainians. The Russians are advancing in the Donbass. They're massing for an assault on Zaporizhia city, it looks like. And they're pushing into Kupyansk in the east of the Kharkiv region.

um so ukraine is losing ground on all fronts meanwhile russia is striking uh ukrainian electricity infrastructure and you know there's it's there constant airstrikes nearly in kiev it's it's about three air raids alerts um at night people are not getting very sleep and

much sleep and then they're losing electricity for six hours a day and it's very very cold so morale is suffering as a result of that in ukraine and obviously the outlook politically is also difficult with trump coming in and saying he'll put pressure on ukraine now the appointment of um

Kellogg as a peace envoy or a Ukraine envoy rather is something that some Ukrainians have viewed positively he's someone that Ukrainians know he's worked with Ukraine before he knows the situation and he's not naive about the Russians and coming to a peace deal that would just suit the Russians and allow them to regroup and then attack again so there there is some understanding that

There is a peace process that is going to start and Ukraine needs to find the best possible way to start that process from a position of relative strength, or at least not weakness. And I think that's what's going to be quite challenging for Ukraine going into this. They want to hold on to the territory they've got in Kursk as a, the Russian territory they have in Kursk as a bargaining position.

They've stepped up their long range strikes on Russian military infrastructure using long range drones. And now obviously we've got storm shadows and attack comes. So the Ukrainians will want to put pressure on Russia together with their Western allies before Trump forces them to the peace talks in January.

I mean, this is what's really interesting. There is an ongoing debate as to as to whether any kind of peace settlement now would be in Ukraine's interest. There are those who say, look, it's really difficult on the front line. Freezing the front lines would be in their interest, and particularly if it comes with some kind of security guarantee, NATO membership or whatever.

That might be the best case scenario currently. There are others who say, yes, OK, Russia is making gains on the front line, but they have some serious long term problems as well in terms of supply. And, you know, we've seen how they're relying increasingly on Iran and North Korea for weaponry.

manpower as well, even now using Yemeni Houthis as well. Long term for Putin, if Ukraine were able to stick this out, Russia's long term situation is really difficult. So there's an incentive for Ukraine to keep fighting. Is that a debate that you're picking up all the time as well?

Yeah, it very much depends on what the ceasefire, any ceasefire settlement looks like. So if there is a ceasefire that would involve any lifting of sanctions on Russia or ending the economic isolation of Russia, then that would allow Russia

Putin just to regather and to regroup and to come back again, like you've seen since 2014, so many broken ceasefires in Ukraine, obviously not to the scale until 2022. But the Ukrainians have learned not to trust the Russians when it comes to ceasefire, because they've just violated the terms of agreements again and again and again.

And so there's a lot of pessimism about whether they can trust it this time around. And this is why Zelensky is so adamant about saying we need something like membership of NATO to make sure that if there is a ceasefire agreement and if Russia again violates that and again invades Ukraine,

then there will be a NATO response to it. Then there will be kind of NATO troops on the ground, NATO air police missions, things like this that could stop the Russians rather than just more weapons and more talking.

they're very worried that sanctions might be lifted, particularly because obviously, Trump is a business focused and he has long had money interests coming from Russia. You know, there is people around him that desperately have yet for desperately for years have wanted to lift

sanctions on Russia and get trade with Russia flowing again and get those petrodollars into their pockets again. So this is what Ukraine is really worried about, that that could happen, that a ceasefire that would lift the isolation of Russia and normalize the situation, just allow Russia to rebuild, regroup and then come back for Ukraine. And that would be dangerous for NATO and the West as well, because I think an emboldened, stronger Russia that's got away with this again would

think about threatening NATO territory, maybe taking a small piece of Estonia, sitting there waiting to see what the NATO reaction is, hoping that they can break NATO by demonstrating that it doesn't respond to Article 5 threats.

What do you make of Zelensky's comments over the weekend? He has suggested that the parts of Ukraine under his control at the moment should be taken under the NATO umbrella to try and stop the hot phase of the war. He was asked whether he would accept NATO membership, but only on the territory that Kiev currently holds. He said he would, but only if NATO membership was offered to the whole of Ukraine within its internationally recognised borders first. What do you make of that proposal, Maxim? And do you think it is feasible?

Well, it's very difficult to envisage how that would work, how that would even be worded that Ukraine joins NATO, but only if the part that it currently holds is invaded, that it would then trigger Article 5. It's difficult to see that. And I'm not sure really that NATO is prepared to say anything.

here's a ceasefire with Russia. If Russia violates that ceasefire, we're then going to war with Russia. I'm not convinced that NATO is still prepared to do that because the consequences naturally, if Ukraine, the territory that Ukraine controls joins NATO and then Russia violates that ceasefire deal, even if it's a few shells, it's a, you know, if it's an incursion and it takes a new town or something, I

at what point does NATO say, okay, now we're entering this war? I think it's a distant prospect. I think that there may be other security guarantees that NATO can provide to Ukraine. I think that NATO should think about

If there is to be a ceasefire agreement that there are troops on the ground in Ukraine, at least in the western part, training Ukrainian armed forces, preparing them as a deterrent for a future conflict, making sure that they're ready and capable, that they have all the weapons they need, a good stockpile of ammunition.

there should be some kind of guarantee that there will be at least an air policing mission over ukraine if russia is to violate the ceasefire agreement if again russian rockets and missiles are flying at kiev and other major cities and threatening civilians that this time nato planes will be shooting those down um that's what ukraine has asked for for a long time that they the skies be protected and that's vital to the survival of the country really if you think about it that

Nothing can really function when the energy blackouts are happening. It's difficult for Ukraine's manufacturing base. It's difficult for people to work. It's difficult even for people to sleep and get up the next day because they're being disturbed so regularly by air raids. Is there not a credibility gap there, though, that a lot of Ukrainians will sense? I mean, if it's not going to be NATO membership, if it's another kind of security guarantee, some Ukrainians will go, well, hang on, we've been here before with the Budapest memorandum and that didn't seem to stand.

Well, I think that's why I'm saying it needs to be some very concrete proposals of what will happen in terms of force and who will go where and troops and air power, because the Budapest memorandum was deliberately left quite vague. It's about security guarantees, but what that entails is never really spelled out. And similarly, I think with Article 5, it says that you will come to the aid of a NATO member who is attacked, but it doesn't actually say how it will do that.

And I think what Ukraine needs in this situation, when the threat is so tangible, it also needs a tangible response to concretely know exactly what that looks like. Should there be a ceasefire agreement? Should Russia violate it? That means NATO planes shooting down Russian missiles and rockets.

Just on Donald Trump, and of course, it is now next month that he'll be inaugurated for his second term as president. Is there maybe more optimism or maybe a better way of putting it is less pessimism than there was maybe six months ago about what a second Trump presidency may mean? And partly because of some of the noises that have come out of the Trump team today.

since the election, proposals such as, for example, a demilitarized zone between Russia and Ukraine, which was immediately kind of poo-pooed by the Kremlin. You can kind of understand why, because they wouldn't want NATO or UN troops on the Russian border. But the fact that they're suggesting that kind of thing that is not necessarily what Moscow would go for, is there some cause for a bit more optimism about what a second Trump presidency may mean for Ukraine?

Well, I think it's very difficult to judge based on the noises that come out of the transition team, because obviously the picture can look very different once they're in power. And, you know, Trump's selection, I think, of candidates for different positions is perhaps more telling because we know what their attitudes are over the longer term. And some of those are.

are very worrying, such as his pick for defence secretary and his pick for the intelligence job, with the top intelligence job, Tulsi Gabbard, who has repeated Kremlin talking points.

And then again, there's Keith Kellogg's appointment, which is looking like it might be quite promising. So it depends on who really gets the power to make the decisions vis-a-vis Ukraine in that situation. I mean, obviously, the Trump transition team seems to be floating all kinds of ideas. Some of them are contradictory. So maybe they're just testing the water, seeing what people will go for, what Ukraine might be interested in.

And I think there will still have to be some very serious negotiations and make sure that they involve Ukraine in the decision-making process. The way that Trump has been talking up until this point is that he can just force it through an agreement, whether Putin likes it or not, and whether Zelensky likes it or not. Obviously, that's not the case. And Ukraine will have to agree any kind of terms and be party and feel like they're confident in those terms as well. Otherwise, they simply will continue fighting.

Obviously, we've had in recent weeks the approval of the ATAKOMs and Storm Shadow missiles, long range missiles supplied by the US and Britain, respectively, for use inside Russia, inside Kursk Oblast. Are we seeing much sign already, Maxim, of that having an impact or is it going to be like so many of these weapons? You know, none of them in and of themselves are a game changer, but it's part of an overall suite of materiel.

It's certainly been a big morale boost. So I've been in the Kharkiv front and I've been in the Donbass front this trip. And it was certainly brought a big morale boost to the troops, especially some of those troops in Kharkiv who said that they'd seen Su-27 jets flying overhead with storm shadow missiles and letting them off and firing them on that day when the Ukrainians attacked a command center which had North Koreans and a Russian general in it.

um and causing a lot of casualties so that has been a big morale boost for them and it does provide serious new capabilities for Ukraine to strike at Russian air bases to strike at infrastructure and different kind of strategic targets that are further away from the front line so if those weapons can be provided in quantity

that would make a difference to the war. And we hear that some storm shadows have in fact been supplied in some quantity prior to this decision being made. And Ukraine is obviously just deciding to use them very carefully and maybe keeping some back because they don't know what the situation will look like post-Trump. I think it would be sensible for Ukrainian generals at the moment to be rationing their use of such weapons because they don't know how many they will have and what the situation will be going forward. But like anything, you know,

this war has proved that Russia is much more capable of building a military industrial complex very rapidly than the West. And the West, despite all of its economic prowess and all of its technological advancement, has responded very, very slowly to something that is really a credible threat, not only to the rules that the West lives by, but also to their, you know, the territorial integrity and the sovereignty of other countries that

Putin might be interested in and has set up historically part of Russia's sphere of interest. And it's kind of astonishing that we're three years in now and there's still a struggle to manufacture more things such as storm shadow in order to help defeat this existential threat.

And we've known for months, if not years, that Ukraine has been having success striking, for example, oil refineries and gas storage facilities, etc., and going after some of Russia's energy infrastructure with drone strikes and indeed now maybe with things like the storm shadows and the attackers. Do we know exactly how much damage that has done to the Russian economy? Well, we can see that the ruble is obviously skyrocketing at the moment, but it's, you know, the

The Russian economy is so heavily manipulated by the state, by the Kremlin, that they're trying to protect it from damage and trying to demonstrate confidence in the Russian market. And they manipulate the information space in order to do that as well. So it's difficult to gain a sense really without being inside the Kremlin of how badly this is affecting Russia.

You know, there are signs of an economy that's creaking, that's struggling under strain. And, you know, I think the West should be prepared to maintain tight sanctions on Russia as long as Russian troops are on Ukrainian soil. So any ceasefire agreement must not see the lifting of sanctions.

And that will, I think, ultimately be the thing that encourages Russia to look for a way out, to look for a way out of the conflict in Ukraine. That does involve them withdrawing troops from Ukrainian territory because the economic sanctions that will bite in the long term and will hurt Russia and will destabilize Putin's regime.

I wanted to ask you, Maxim, you've been spending some time recently with the Karteja Brigade, who's a National Guard unit made up of many non-Ukrainian nationals. Can you give us a bit of a sense as to the conversations you've been having and who these fighters are? So, yeah, I was very interested in, you know, that the picture looks pretty bleak for Ukraine with troops falling back in multiple different regions. But to the north of Kharkiv, which is obviously very important because Kharkiv is Ukraine's second largest city,

the Ukrainians have actually been pushing the Russians back slowly, but back towards the border. And I wanted to look at some of the reasons that this brigade was having successes. And it does seem to me in the time that I spent with Ukrainian troops that the best motivated, best equipped and best organized brigades or special forces are the ones that have adopted NATO command and control structures and planning methods.

And Harcher is the same. So they had been, it's a National Guard brigade that had been trained by Ukrainian officers, had been trained by NATO in 2018, then formed it according to NATO standards, NATO decision-making processes. And it's a much more democratic way of warfare. So you have a brigade commander that will listen to some of the junior officers' orders.

in a command center, they will war game and analyze different methods and the outcomes of those very meticulously and put a lot of effort into doing that before they issue orders. And that seems to save lives. And it also seems to motivate the troops. Now, for that reason, they have attracted quite a lot of international fighters as well. And I was spending time with a young Scottish lad, 19 years old, who left the British infantry to come and fight for Ukraine.

And he had chosen the Hathia Brigade, along with many other international comrades, because they have a different way of fighting it. It's a more democratic approach, and they're more confident that their lives won't be wasted and thrown away by a commander that makes a decision without having all the information, without listening to his subordinate officers.

That's really interesting. Just on the command structure, is there a reason that the Ukrainian forces more generally haven't been able to replicate that? Why is it limited only to certain brigades? Is it because it is actually harder, you know, it's easier said than done to implement that kind of command structure across the board?

So since 2014, I think the West really focused on training the National Guard units in this kind of new NATO structure. And the Ukrainian army is still based on this kind of inherited Soviet doctrine and has been changing. But obviously, it's difficult to change the command structure and train hundreds of thousands of troops in a different way of thinking now.

during this time, and especially when you're at war, to radically change these things is difficult. You know, HARTIA have been training other brigades in this. They've been training the command staff of other brigades, 59 other brigades that they've trained, and Sirsky seems to be quite happy with that and wants more brigades to adopt this NATO structure. But while they're in the transition phase, they told me that they have to produce two order documents every time for, like, the senior commanders because they have to have

the NATO style documents for internal use and then they have to have the Soviet style orders for external use within the armed forces. And that's taking a lot of time and complicates matters. I think it's always difficult to reform something and especially you don't want to be

be changing the way that you give orders while a battalion is in active combat with the Russians. So I think that's the difficulty. They are trying to do it, but it requires some time and it requires brigades who have been rotated somewhere perhaps calmer or for some rest.

Just to go back to, you know, you mentioned that young Scottish lad that you were speaking to who signed up for the brigade. What was motivating him? Because, you know, at the start of the full scale invasion, we heard a lot about non-Ukrainian volunteers, fighters going out there to serve alongside the Ukrainians.

Maybe you don't see it so much now, but obviously in his case, he's very much been motivated to do that. What did he tell you about his motivations, you know, almost three years into this conflict now since the Foskale invasion to go out and fight alongside the Ukrainians? Well, he talked about.

some of the worst successes that we've seen during the invasion, you know, rape, torture, executions of prisoners and the feeling of injustice that he felt when he saw what was happening in Ukraine. And he was motivated as someone who had had military training in the British infantry and the reserves to go and do something about it. And so for him, it was very important that, you know,

The West understands the situation with Russia. He thinks that Russia is a war machine that will not stop in Ukraine and would carry on to other countries. He doesn't want to see other European countries threatened in that way. So he kind of took his understanding, his training and did something directly about it.

You do see there are increasing numbers on both sides actually of foreign mercenaries, basically people who are well-trained soldiers that come for a paycheck. And in that brigade, there's actually a number of Colombian fighters who were in the Colombian armed forces during the fighting with FARC and then were demobilized after that. And they've come and applied their skills in Ukraine.

But Ukraine has been very, very welcoming to those troops. They don't use them in the same way as the Russians. The Russians will use foreign troops basically as cannon fodder. Ukrainians are quite careful with them. They appreciate that they've got previous skills and experience and they try to make the most of that. And they rely on a lot of them for sergeants in the Harte Brigade. So I think that's also some of the attraction that if you've got the training, the military experience that Ukraine will try and put you to good use.

And just finally, Maxim, obviously, we're entering December now, we're properly into winter. What, how much movement do you expect to see on the front lines in Ukraine over the course of the next few months?

Well, typically, you know, when the ground is very hard and frozen and it's, you know, it's miserable fighting conditions and then it rains and then it freezes and it rains and freezes, it's typically not conditions that troops want to fight in and they tend to try and stay indoors and away from, you know, advancing across large territories, particularly when it's difficult to advance with vehicles because of FPV drone threat, which is just exponentially increased now. If you go near the front end of the vehicle, you can expect to be targeted by FPVs either side.

So I think it normally would mean slow going, but then we also have this idea that come January, peace talks might be

forced upon both sides, which would mean that they have now to jockey for the best possible position. And that's why we see some reports of a Russian troop buildup in Zaporizhia, I suppose, so that the Russians can try and get the best possible foothold in the region that they claim as their own before they go to peace talks, which I think also demonstrates how difficult it will be for the Trump administration to get a reasonable settlement. If the Russians are already saying they're pushing to try and get

every square inch of territory from the four Ukrainian regions that they claim now as Russian, it's going to be very difficult to see how you can reconcile

those ambitions with Ukraine saying, well, look, this is the four regions that have been our territory forever, and you came and just took part of them. Are we going to accept that in any form, especially while you're still trying to take some of the major cities in those regions? I think it's going to be very, very difficult to find a meaningful ceasefire agreement, let alone a just and lasting peace, which I just think is nearly impossible to find at this point.

Maxim Tucker, always appreciate your insight and your analysis. Thank you so much for joining us again on Frontline. Thanks for having me. Thank you for watching today's episode of Frontline. For early access to our videos, member-only Q&As and live streams, then sign up for a membership via the link in the description. And for the latest news and breaking stories, listen to Times Radio and follow us at thetimes.com.

We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly. But it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients. Becky Berry is a beef farmer in the Wiltshire countryside who supplies beef to McDonald's for its iconic burgers. I'm part of a group of farmers and we've been on a journey that McDonald's have sponsored to help us with learning more about regenerative practices.

and how that can benefit us, our farms, the people and the animals that we're producing. It's a way of McDonald's giving back to the whole industry. What we're trying to do now is move the cows from where they've eaten and they're moving into a longer, lusher pasture. And part of that reason is to help the biodiversity.

As you can see here in the long grass, we've got moths and butterflies that have just hatched out. We can hear in the hedgerows around the outside of the field the birdsong. Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's Plan for Change on the McDonald's website.

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