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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes each. Hello and welcome to the Friday episode of the Battleground podcast with me, Saul David, and Patrick Bishop. Our guest today is Julia Strauss, veteran journalist, Russian speaker, and former bureau chief for the Daily Telegraph in Moscow, who's just returned to Kiev after touring eastern Ukraine to find out how people are coping, as he puts it, under the shadow of the Russian guns.
Before we speak to Julius, we're going to do a quick roundup of the latest news. And the big story this week, I think, is that China has agreed to strengthen its strategic partnership with Russia as the pair present a united dual opposition to the West. At a meeting in Beijing between the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, they promised mutual support.
China and Russia must take a clear-cut stand on the side of historical progress, said Wang, according to the Russian state media, on the side of historical progress, on the side of fairness and justice, oppose all acts of hegemony, tyranny and bullying, oppose Cold War thinking and separatist provocations, and actively push for the construction of a common future for all humankind. And he said all this, Patrick, believe it or not, without a hint of irony.
Yes, they can do all this with a straight face, can't they? Very convincingly. Partly in response, Mochea Gheorgheana, the deputy chief of NATO, said that the US and its European allies needed to face down the threat of Russia and China. The West was locked, he said, in an era of great power struggle.
competition with autocratic countries such as Russia, its ally China, North Korea and Iran, and the transatlantic alliance was more important than ever. As much as Europe needs America, America, I think, needs all its allies, he told The Telegraph. The strategic reality is that China is a formidable challenger and that Russia and China and all the others together will create massive attempts to disrupt American policy.
power. Well, I think all that's true, isn't it, Saul? Yeah, absolutely. Also this week, it's interesting, a lot of the stories seem to be interconnected because not unrelated to this is the trip that Cameron, our foreign secretary, has just made to the US in an effort to persuade Republicans to drop Congress's long-delayed $60 billion aid package to Ukraine, but also to meet Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where
Well, that meeting's taken place, Patrick. We don't know much about the detail. Cameron declined to get into specifics of what he dubbed a private meeting, but said the pair had discussed...
geopolitical issues like Gaza and Ukraine. This was entirely in line with precedent of government ministers meeting with opposition politicians in the run-up to elections, the UK Foreign Secretary has said. But there's been no strong indication that this trip has actually done any good, has there, Patrick? And even one or two reports, I've seen some comment pieces suggesting that Cameron's doing more harm than good. What's your feeling about this? Was it worth him going out there, do you think?
Well, it's often the case, isn't it, that, you know, when either UK politicians sort of stick their oar into American politics or American politicians do the same to UK politics, that the results are never, you know, what they intended to do, it would seem. I'm thinking of it, do you remember when Obama came over here just before lockdown?
The Brexit referendum, yeah, and, you know, strongly counselled against British voters backing Brexit and, you know, got a pretty sort of hostile response all round saying, what's it got to do with you, mate? You know, I think this is never really a sensible thing to do. The other thing, of course, is David Cameron is very, you know, he's not going to be around for much longer. It's absolutely inevitable the Tories are going to lose the election.
So he will no longer be in position to influence anything. It would be interesting to know if Trump put any flesh on the bones of his oft-repeated boast that he would end the Ukraine conflict today.
in 24 hours in power. Now, he's actually never specified what the deal would actually be. But we do know from a recent Washington Post report that the master plan is for Ukraine to hand over the Donbass and Crimea in return for peace. So, you know, it's hardly anything that hasn't been mooted before. But of course, Ukraine would see this, as I think we would saw as a surrender to
and for at least not the basis for any kind of deal. But as you say, nothing has actually been said about what was discussed in the meeting. But I imagine that Cameron would have been pressing him to put some flesh on the bones of that boast that he has a master plan.
Well, I suppose the other interesting news this week, Patrick, is more details about successful Ukrainian long-range drone strikes. And it's interesting that a lot of the questions we seem to be getting from listeners are on that subject. And why wouldn't they be, of course, with the ammunition shortage? But there was a report in the ISW this week that noted that Ukrainian drone strikes against Russian oil refineries are reportedly forcing Russia to seek gasoline imports from Kazakhstan. So they're actually having to import gasoline
petrol and other petroleum products into Russia, which of course produces a lot of oil from Kazakhstan, which gives an indication of the success of these drone strikes. This is a very controversial subject, of course, because the Americans apparently are trying to put pressure on Ukraine not to take out these oil refineries because it's going to affect the world oil price. But that strikes us, and I think our listeners too, as
incredibly hypocritical. I mean, America was a great destroyer of German oil, as you will know, Patrick, from the bombing campaign in the Second World War. And it's an entirely legitimate aim for Ukraine to try and degrade its enemy's ability to fight war. Anyway, going on with this report, three unnamed industry sources told Reuters in an article published on April 8th
that Russia had asked Kazakhstan to establish an emergency reserve of 100,000 metric tons of gasoline that Kazakhstan could supply to Russia in case of shortages exacerbated by Ukrainian drone strikes and resulting refinery outages. Yeah, I think they were also seeking for some relief from Belarus as well. So clearly these are having an effect.
And combined with this, we've got an ongoing series of drone strikes against military facilities inside Russia. At least four Russian air bases were targeted on the night of April the 4th to April the 5th. And the Ukrainian Security Service, the SBU, and Ukrainian forces conducted successful strikes on airfields near Kursk city at Yeisk airport.
Krasnodar cry, the Engels Air Base in Saratov, which has been hit numerous times now.
the Morozovsk airbase in Rostov Oblast. Now, these drone strikes are said to have significantly damaged three Tupolev 95MS strategic bombers at Engels, two Su-25 fixed-wing aircraft at Yezik, and six unidentified aircraft elsewhere, I think at Morozovsk airbase. So this is all, you know, the steady degradation of the Russian air power. It may not be
you know crippling their ability but it's certainly an ongoing problem that the russians are going to have to deal with or are having to deal with and of course it's part of that
you know, new strategy that's very discernible, indeed, openly stated by the Ukrainians that this is how they're going to conduct the next phase of the war. But going back to the story at the top, so should we be worried about this new kind of axis that seems to be forming this Russian-Chinese solidarity front, which, you know, it's been around for a long time, but it seems to be gaining strength and becoming a real thing, doesn't it?
Well, it is alarming. The extent to which it's related to the holding up of funds and therefore Russian gains on the battlefield is hard to tell. I mean, China, as we've mentioned many times, was relatively lukewarm in its support for Russia's war at the start. But is this changing? I mean, it's certainly taken advantage of increased trade with Russia. That was up by more than a quarter last year to a record $240 billion.
China, of course, is still insisting that it's not supplying weapons. This is the red line for the Americans. But Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, said last week that China, and I quote, continues to provide materials to support Russia's defence industrial base. So they may not be weapons, but of course, they're helping the war effort.
And Janet Yellen, the US Treasury Secretary, has warned Chinese officials of the consequences of supporting the Russian armed forces. So similar sort of threat. And it's obvious, I think, that Russia might use this implicit threat of secondary sanctions against China to build closer ties. Indeed, that's something that Lavrov was specific about this week. But what about you, Patrick? How do you see these new closer ties playing out?
Well, it's very difficult to say, isn't it, Saul? Because we're entering a new era, I feel. You get the impression that China's sensing there's blood in the water. And I think this is due to the changing climate.
geopolitical landscape. And of course, there are two main factors involved in that. One, of course, is the presidential election in the United States. There's a fair possibility that Donald Trump will win. It's not a certainty by any means. But if that is the case, then we enter a phase of vast uncertainty. No one knows with any precision how he's going to conduct his foreign policy. Perhaps he doesn't even know himself. And all we can do really is go on the past, what he did when he was
last in power. Now, if we're reading the runes from his
previous presidency. We get rather mixed picture contradictory signals. I mean, broadly speaking, he was hostile to China, at least on trade matters. We'll remember those huge tariffs he imposed on Chinese goods back in 2018. And he was relatively warmer, at least equivocal about Putin's Russia, the direction that Putin was taking his country in.
Now, you know, Putin isn't going anywhere, is he? This is a big feature of this landscape we're talking about, the immovability of Vladimir Putin. I think we've all been guilty of wishful thinking, clinging to the idea that the pointlessness of the invasion of Ukraine, the heavy losses, the damage it's done to Russia's economy and its standing in the world, somehow that's going to fatally undermine Putin at home in one way or another. But there's no sign that this is actually happening.
So China, I would say, has an interest here in strengthening its relationship with Russia, being less equivocal in its support on the basis that it could use a more solid alliance with Putin as leverage in what may be a rough ride with Trump if he comes to power. So, you know, it's very, very hard to discern a kind of pattern that might emerge from all this.
And what we do know about Trump is that making America great again, emphatically, does not involve overseas interventions. So you've got all these sort of swirling, sometimes contradictory elements in the mix. And I don't think anyone sensible would risk making a prediction about how it's going to play out, except to say, I'm afraid that it's hard to see how any of this is good for Ukraine or Russia.
Western security generally. Okay, well, as we mentioned at the top, we're now going to hear from Julius Strauss, the veteran journalist, Russian speaker and former bureau chief for the Daily Telegraph in Moscow, who's just returned to Kiev after a tour of Ukraine's Eastern Front.
Julius, welcome back to the podcast. Good to be here again. Now, I'd be following your progress on the blog. We'll let the listeners into the details of that in just a moment. Your stated aim, as you put it, is to see how people are coping in the East under the shadow of the Russian guns. What are their hopes, fears and predictions about
and against the backdrop of increasingly industrialized warfare, what do their daily lives look like? So we're going to find out about that in a moment. But before we get a sense of that, can you just give...
a bit of insight into the type of emergency kit journalists like you. I mean, you were traveling with a photographer, I think, weren't you? So it was two of you in a rented car. What sort of kit do you take with you and what precautions do you take to stay safe? Well, there's a sort of a gold standard and that would include, you know, modern flak jackets, potentially an armored car, ideally a discreetly armored car. So you're not sticking out too much. Um,
a medical kit, maybe a security advisor. But these days, so I worked at the Daily Telegraph for 15 years and that would have been pretty standard. But these days I'm a freelance, so I kind of put it together myself, which is a much more interesting process. So in this case, it was two borrowed flak jackets in exchange for a bottle of good Scottish whiskey and a rental car from Sixt, which I thought would work out just fine, but didn't.
because they had a tracker on the vehicle. Oh no, so you didn't actually tell them where you were going, presumably, for obvious reasons. No, no, I looked innocent and harmless. And so the first rude message came through when we were in Kukyansk in the sort of north-eastern part of the front line. And it was very polite and it said, Mr Strauss, your life is in danger. Please.
Please move away from the front line. The second one was far less polite because we then said, yes, yes, of course, we'll move away. And we went down to Kramatorsk instead. And the second one said, we have sent the security team to repossess your vehicle. You will be charged for having it towed back to Kiev. We have your credit card details and we will punish you. And so after that one, I wrote back and I said, don't worry, we're heading back west.
And then we just took a chance and headed a little bit further east, hoping they weren't watching it, headed down to Konstantinivka. And then we did finally turn west and gave the car back yesterday. And the poor man said, you know, I didn't sleep for two days. Which may or may not be true.
I think he might have been a little bit more worried about his car than about your well-being, Julius. I might be wrong. So let's get into the detail. You started off in Kyiv. That's presumably where you picked up the car. But you then drove east to Kharkiv.
Ukraine city. And as you mentioned, it's just 24 miles from the Russian border and therefore uniquely vulnerable to attack, particularly missile and drone attack. Tell me a little bit about conditions there and how people are holding up. Yeah, I mean, I didn't really expect the increase in attacks to happen just as we arrived in town because there have been sporadic attacks for a while. But it seems that the last week the Russians are changing their tactics and they're using particularly
drones, some missiles, some larger bombs. Kharkiv has very poor air defense. It's very close to the Russian border. So you don't get, you get very little warning when something is coming. You might get 30 seconds if you're lucky. And because something is always coming somewhere in the sky, those, even those warnings begin to become meaningless after a while.
And the other thing is that the Ukrainians seem to have concentrated their air defense around Kiev because they're short of air defense. They're really running out, we're told, of Patriot missiles and that sort of thing. So Kharkiv is vulnerable.
Something has changed in what the Russians are doing, and we're not quite sure what yet. But they're certainly trying to terrorize the people of Kharkiv. Whether that is with a view to actually forcing the population out of the city or not, we'll have to wait and see. So we stayed in Kharkiv for about three or four days. A lot of electricity cuts, quite severe.
quite hard to sort of operate there. But at the same time, a huge amount of a huge spirit of resilience. And, you know, we're not moving. We're staying. We've left once before at the beginning of the war and we're not going to do it again. So remarkably, there's still estimates. The estimates are there's still 1.2, 1.3 million people living in Kharkiv, which is enormous. It's an enormous city. And every day,
For not every single day, but many days, four or five people get killed by drone strikes. Just this very strange feeling. You're in relative safety. You're walking around in relative normality. Even when the power cuts are on, the generators are going and life is kind of normal. And then suddenly this thing appears out of the sky and kills five people randomly.
One other thing worth mentioning is that they seem the Russians seem to be going for a double tap tactic now, which is particularly nasty. And, you know, so they'll hit something and then they'll hit the rescuers. And there's even talk of a triple tap, which, of course, is.
would also affect journalism because when you go to these places to cover the events, you're thinking to yourself, okay, if something comes in now, I'm really in trouble. So it's making calculations around safety, especially for the first responders, the firemen and the medical teams, really, really difficult, but also a little bit for journalists too. Yeah.
Yeah, I think I remember that Kharkiv was the location for some of the hotels being targeted, the hotels used by journalists, certainly by Westerners more generally. So, you know, there's a bit of a record of that already. Given its geographical position, though, Julius, and the fact that it's
was and presumably still is inhabited by quite a few ethnic Russians. I mean, Ukrainians with ethnic Russian background. You might have expected it to, you know, be a little bit uncertain about where its loyalties lie. Did you ever get any sense of that or is the opposite the case now, given that the inhabitants are experiencing, you know, the horrors of what Putin's capable of?
It's changed completely. I was there a year ago and I speak moderately good Russian. I can get by in Russian certainly. And I don't speak Ukrainian, although I understand a little bit, but the two languages are significantly different, which we forget sometimes.
And a year ago, I could definitely get by in Russian in Kharkiv. Now, very, very difficult. Everybody understands what I say, and nobody wants to answer me in Russian. And I didn't get the feeling it was because they were being difficult. I just got the feeling that they're now used to speaking in Ukrainian.
People have switched. I didn't come across any sympathy for Russia at all in Kharkiv. I think the Russians have really lost the sympathy there. The only place in eastern Ukraine where there was still some ambiguity and people were still willing to speak Russian was Donbass. That was still more mixed. But I was absolutely amazed in Kharkiv and that area at the unwillingness of people to speak Russian this time.
Now, there's a lovely piece in something you wrote recently. I think it was in The Spectator about this trip, I think, where you talk about the Kharkiv authorities setting up a radio station for people to basically vent their frustrations. I think the name you gave was roughly translated as boiling over or fed up. What kind of things are people saying on that radio station?
I mean, they're venting, you know, it's just out and out venting about the Russians. You know, a lot of it is very rude. So yeah, they set up this radio station and, you know, because you have to ask yourself, if you're living in a city of 1 million people and you're regularly being targeted and you continuously feel unsafe and there's not much power, you know, how do you psychologically deal with that? It's easy for us. We go in for two or three days, but if you're there for two years,
And, you know, the things, so we sort of went out looking for the ways, the coping mechanisms, if you like. One of them is definitely a sort of a unified hatred of Russians. That really binds people. And for some people it's Russia, as in Putin, right?
a sort of political entity, but for a lot of people now, it's Russians. It's not just Putin. They say, look, 80% of Russians supported the taking of Crimea. Let's not be naive. This is not about one man and his regime. This is about a nation that is in a sort of a post-war
imperial state that just is behaving in a bad way. So, you know, one way is that. Another thing that I was quite surprised at in the last week is how much psychotherapy is available in a lot of parts of Ukraine. And, you know, coming from the generation I do, I'm not skeptical about psychotherapy, although sometimes I feel that it is kind of ladled out a bit too easily and maybe too often.
But it really seems to be working for them. There's a lot of helplines out there. There are big posters. Most of it is free. Most of it's done by volunteers. And people have mentioned this again and again and again, that it's actually very good for them to talk to volunteers
Either professionals or what they call peer-to-peer psychotherapy, where veterans talk to other veterans. And then, yes, as you mentioned, the other thing is this radio station, which is basically an anti-Russian rant with a few digs thrown in at the local authorities.
But there are also, you know, telegram channels. And if you go on a telegram channel, particularly if you go on a local Kharkiv one, it will tell you when the bomb is coming in or when they think the bomb is going to come in. And then it'll show you all the little emojis underneath that people think about this.
And so there's a lot of sort of emoji, emoji venting going on as well. You know, everything from sort of, you know, the sort of emojis for swear words, for the emojis for feces or turds or whatever it is that, you know, they think about these are the Russians and their bombs. So and I think this gives them some psychological resilience, this venting ability. Okay, we're going to take a break there. Please join us after the break and hear what Julius got up to on the rest of his tour of Ukraine.
Okay, moving on from Kharkiv, I think you next went to Kupyansk, which obviously is pretty close to the front line. It was recaptured, I think, by the Ukrainians in the autumn of 2022. And the Russians clearly want to get their hands back on it. What did you find there? What was the sort of mindset in Kupyansk?
kopians was interesting we went to one other place first and it's called um it's taken me about three days to learn how to say it's called velika pisarov pisarivka in ukrainian it's a real mouthful and the reason that was interesting it's only about four miles from the front line it with russia proper and the russians have basically smashed it to pieces in the last three weeks
And the reason that, I mean, it's tragic at a human level and dramatic to see it. I mean, these, what they call the cabs, which are the glide bombs, you know, when these things land, they create enormous amounts of damage.
One reason that was interesting is Putin did make this comment. It was on TASS about, you know, the Russian news agency about three or four weeks ago where he talked about creating a cordon sanitaire along the border. And this might be part of a new policy to destroy areas just the other side of the border, to make them unlivable, to create...
that cordon sanitaire. And one thought that has come up in my mind is whether the Kharkiv thing might be part of that. So I'm not saying that Kharkiv is going to be part of Putin's cordon sanitaire because we certainly don't know that yet. But it is a terrifying thought that he might have decided he wants to empty a city of two million people in order to have that kind of no man's land. But going back to Kupyansk, Kupyansk
A year ago, there were more people, the markets were busier. We're still under threat. It was still being shelled occasionally. But this time, you felt it much more. We heard about four explode. We drove north of Kupyansk on a sort of a rescue mission to, we were trying to find a young woman who wanted to be evacuated. We did find her in the end.
We heard about four explosions up there. And then from Kupiansk itself, you can go to sort of a high part of the town, look down, you can actually see the front line and all the smoke and the explosions on the front line just to the east of the city.
I don't want to over-speculate with Kupyat because people have been saying for a year that it might be retaken. And of course, we just don't know. But the feeling is generally after Avdiyevka in the south, after the Russians took that, they're pushing at all these frontline towns. And they will just decide when exactly they want to sort of make a concerted effort to grab one of them. And I think if they do, it'll be Bakhmut style. It'll be block by block and just smash it to pieces as they come in.
Okay, and moving on from Kupiansk, where else have you been, Julius? And did you have a chance to talk to some of the soldiers on or near the front line? Yes, we did. We drove down to much of the Karhaya Company's annoyance. We drove down to Klamatorsk, which is centrally in the Donbass. And we stayed there the night.
We visited a couple of places that have been targeted by, you know, specifically targeted by the Russians, which you mentioned hotels, but they've also been targeting pizza, pizzerias. They smashed up another hotel in Pakros. So places where foreign journalists go, soldiers go. I should really turn that around. Places where mainly Ukrainian soldiers go, but occasionally foreign journalists go. Places that, you know, high chance of
killing people. And then we drove down to Konstantinivka, which is very close to Chasivya, which is the front line now. It's about five kilometers away. And then we drove to Pokrovsk and we tried to talk to soldiers all the way along the way. And what I got initially was,
Talking to soldiers, we also talked to soldiers in Izum, which is another sort of nearish to the frontline town. What I got initially was this sort of feeling that, look, we're not angry with the West. We're thankful to the West for all the help it's given. You know, angry is the wrong way of putting it, but we do need more. But when I began to talk to the real sort of hardcore guys who have just come off the frontline, I spoke to one guy from Avdiivka. He was furious with the West. He's like, no, you have really let us down.
He said his analogy was you're sending us into fight with the
a pistol against a tank and you're expecting us to be able to pull off that fight. He'd been on the front line for two years. He was very bitter. He was bitter with Zelensky. He was bitter about almost everything, which is understandable. I mean, two years fighting continuously with poor ammunition. But I think, you know, we talked to quite a lot of people and the big sense I got, there's sort of three things going on. One is that
the Ukrainians really do not have enough ammunition. They really need artillery ammunition and ideally they need some kind of air cover. But the artillery ammunition is the number one requirement and they're not getting it anymore from us, from the West. The second thing is a question of manpower. They're short of men. The Ukrainian army is short of men.
But solving that problem is difficult and complicated. You know, we think, well, you just rotate the guys off the front and you put new guys in. But of course, the guys on the front may be exhausted and bitter, but they're bloody good at what they do after two years of fighting, fighting the Russians. So the idea that you just put in a, you know, a new recruit who's had a couple of weeks training with a new gun, it just doesn't quite work like that.
and then there are a lot of systemic problems with manpower as well you know the ukrainians are basically shifting from an old soviet system where the officer comes in and says give me 200 men i want to take that bridge and they just round up 200 guys and he gets them to a system where someone puts their hand up and says you know i'm a cook i'm a mechanic i'm a and then they get pushed into specialized roles which is a much more ideal system but a much harder system to organize and
manage. And then the sort of third element, I think, is fortifications. You know, the Ukrainians haven't been great at building fortifications. And I think there's a psychological reason for this. You know, as soon as you start fortifying the front line in eastern Ukraine, you're basically saying we're giving up on a whole bunch of territory. And so they haven't done a great job, but now they're really digging everywhere we went from the north
to the Kupyansk area, to the Donbas area, they're digging everywhere. And some of its machines, some of its stuff we saw that had just been prepared, properly built trenches, properly built bunkers, huge pieces of timber to sort of shore them up, cement and so on and so on. So I think the memo has kind of gone through now. We are on the retreat and we have to build fortifications.
But as one guy said to me, well, fortifications are all very well and good, but if we haven't got the men and the ammunition to defend them, they're not worth anything. So it's a difficult problem. It's not going to be an easy one to solve. And I think all three of those issues have to be solved. They need more ammunition. They need to organize their manpower, and they need to build fortifications if they're going to stop this kind of rumble of Russian advance. It's not a very optimistic picture, I have to say.
Yeah, and sort of linked to the final point you've made, Julius, and this is my last question, we'll let you get on. Did you get any kind of sense from people that they are, you know, kind of losing heart? Are they generally speaking, both civilians and soldiers, determined to carry on? Or do you think they would accept, as the point you were making with the building of these fortifications, some kind of compromise piece that might lead
them losing some territory? You know, it's difficult to generalize about everybody because of course there are different opinions, but just to kind of pick apart a couple of the strands of opinion in places like Kiev and places away from the frontline, you get a lot of patriotism and a lot of big talk and a lot of, we're going to fight them. And we're not, we're going to win victory, victory, victory. When you get closer to the frontline,
You get more realism. And people say, this guy, this one guy I talked to, he's stuck in my head because the look in his eyes was something that sort of almost pierced me. I felt this kind of... And I said, when is the war going to end? And he said, I have no idea. Five years, 10 years. He said, I probably won't survive it anyway. So...
He didn't say whatever, but he's like, who the hell knows? This could go on forever. You get a much more, much, much more pessimism.
And then of course you get some people who are waiting for the Russians, especially older people. You think of the Soviet Union, back in the day I had security, life was simpler, I didn't have to deal with all this democracy nonsense. It's a minority, even in the sort of small regions of the Donbas, but it is there. We have to be honest about it. So giving an overall picture, no, people are beginning to get very tired. They're less optimistic.
But the thing is this, they know, or what they've seen so far in this two-year war, is that when Russians take areas, they behave incredibly badly. Anybody who has any record of opposing them gets tortured or killed or removed or imprisoned or beaten or whatever it is. That's one thing. And the other thing is, they know, or they suspect, and I think they're right with this, is that any piece of paper that Putin signs is not worth the paper it's written on. So...
There's no alternative. So it's not that they don't want to go into negotiations necessarily. It's just that they don't see them as leading anywhere or, you know, the best case scenario, they see it as passing the buck down the line to people in five or 10 years time. And obviously they don't like that idea that, you know, we're going to give up so that our kids, or maybe not even our kids, but our younger brothers are going to have to fight this war again in five years time.
So I think that is what is holding, what is keeping the glue of the resilience, not a sort of a crazy patriotic optimism. Okay. Thanks so much, Julius. That's absolutely fascinating. We really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. Stay safe. You're out of the frontline now, so I think you'll be relatively safe. There are one or two Patriot missiles still defending Kyiv, I think, so you should be all right now. I think there are. I hope there are. I hope it's better off in Kharkiv, certainly.
Well, that was fascinating, Patrick, wasn't it? The sort of mixed bag of impressions that we've got from people on the East, incredibly dangerous in places like Kharkiv and Kramatorsk. And yet, you know, the determination to carry on is still holding. Otherwise, why would 1.3 million people still be in Kharkiv, a town that's, you know, under daily attack? And as Julius pointed out, it's very difficult to know if you're actually going to be safe from one minute
to the next because the distance between Russia and the city is so short there's absolutely no chance to prepare for the incoming missiles and therefore people pretty much ignore them and if you get hit well it's incredibly bad luck I mean it's hard to get your head around frankly Patrick isn't it if you remember our own trip we we had these kind of messages coming in all the time and the assumption is you've probably got half an hour or possibly longer to you know to get yourself into a bathroom absolutely yeah there's a very different situation there when you're right on Russia's
So bravo, Julius, for taking those risks in order to get the message out. Well done.
Okay, before we go into questions per se, we've had an email from David Alexander, our resident cybersecurity expert, and it's very interesting, I have to say. So he writes, hi Saul and Patrick, some cyber news that I think is worthy of mention. I've talked in previous briefings about the Tallinn Manual, which is the officially recognized manual on the legal conduct of cyber warfare. The
The Ukrainian government, he says, is gathering evidence against the Russian military hackers known as Sandworm, which is effectively a unit of their GRU, which is Russian military intelligence. Now, David's written about their work before. Ukraine, he says, is planning to bring formal charges against Sandworm in the International Criminal Court in The Hague. So what's the case? Well, the case in question concerns the attack on Ukraine's largest mobile communications provider,
Kyivstar last December. It's alleged that Sandworm Group hacked Kyivstar, stole their customer data and then wiped the data and software from almost all Kyivstar's servers. This caused widespread disruption within Ukraine for many days.
Sanwa, according to David, also attempted to attack and disable all of Kyivstar's cellular base stations located at over 100,000 sites across Ukraine. But in this, they failed. The CEO of Kyivstar, Oleksandr Komarov, gave some details of the attack, uh,
in February once they'd recovered to normal operations. He stated that Sandworm had first gained access to Keevstar IT infrastructure back in May 2023, and since then had been conducting reconnaissance of the network to identify how it was built and where data was stored. This took time. Obviously, they had to be careful not to be discovered. It's thought it took them until November to gain all the access and system for the
permissions they needed, at which point they extracted the customer data and prepared to cause catastrophic disruption to Keivstar. Now, this type of attack on civilian infrastructure is a war crime, according to a definition by the International Criminal Court prosecutor Kareem Khan.
who noted that cyber attacks on civilian infrastructure, energy, gas supply stations and telecom operators can be recognised as war crimes. So Ukraine is acting on this and it's gathering evidence. But David's point is, is it doing the right thing? Because in his view, there's very little realistic prospect of gaining a meaningful conviction. Even if they get one, Russia's not going to act on it. As we know, Putin's already been indicted. And the third interesting point that he makes is that actually Ukraine has done...
something relatively similar and therefore might be, as David puts it, hoist by its own petard. In retaliation for the Kyiv Star attack, a not dissimilar destructive cyber attack was launched against a Russian ISP. So it tried to do the same thing. It was part of a wide-ranging cyber attack, which also hit the Russian Federal Tax Service, a major defense contractor, and a Russian police.
drone control system used by the armed forces. So there we are. I mean, it's fascinating stuff. And I don't know about you, Patrick, but that sort of slipped under my radar, I have to say. Yeah, I mean, this is something, this war that's being fought
in cyberspace is a really big part of the overall battlefield, isn't it? But we don't hear that much about it. So thanks very much, David, for illuminating us about all these fascinating and murky goings on. Now, there's one question here from Max, who asked a very simple query. He says, can you explain why we're not providing the Ukrainians with the most powerful of our drone systems?
like Reaper and Predator? Well, that is an interesting question. I mean, I think Predator is pretty much retired now. The U.S. military stopped using it, I think, back in 2017. But Reaper is still very much in service. Now, this is a very big UAV. It's 11 meters long. It's got a wingspan of over 22 meters.
And indeed, it is operating in the Ukrainian battle space by the US. The US are operating these things for their own purposes, surveillance mainly, intelligence gathering. But of course, they'll be sharing that with Ukrainians. And only last year, about almost exactly a year ago, there was an incident when a Russian fighter jet collided with a Ukrainian
USM Q9 Reaper over the Black Sea and the US operators had to then crash the drone into the sea. Now this is remotely operated obviously with a two-person team. We've got a pilot who's actually flying the thing and an air crew member who operates the sensors and in the case of using it for offensive action would actually be operating the weapon systems.
But the point is that there was some talk about giving Ukraine some of the older generation of reapers. I think this was about a year ago. But the crucial issue here was what happens if Ukraine
one of them crashes or it's knocked down or whatever and falls into Russian hands. So despite the fact they've been around for quite a long time, there's still sensitive technology on board. And I think the danger of this falling into the hands of the Russians led to that process being brought to a halt. So that didn't go anywhere. So I think that's the answer to the question is that the danger of it actually being, of one of these Reapers, even an older generation one being captured by the Russians,
outweighed the benefits to handing them over to Ukrainians in the eyes of the Americans. Yeah, and one other quick point about Reaper, Patrick. I'm not an expert in aerial warfare, as you know, but it strikes me that they are really chiefly used when you've got air superiority at the very minimum. I mean, they are pretty big, cumbersome aircrafts.
and are nice fat juicy targets, I suspect, for enemy planes and ground-to-air missiles. So I suspect that might be another factor. But as you say, of course, it's something that the Americans really want to keep their hands on in terms of the technology. Well, moving on, we've got quite an amusing message from someone called Peter Baker, who had a chance conversation with a stranger when they were walking their dogs recently. And their discussion revolved around military equipment
a subject he's been very interested in since the Cold War.
Towards the end of their exchange, the individual who claimed to consult to special forces and the defence industry worldwide in electronic warfare, does that ring any bells for you, Patrick? Including extensive experience in technical aspects of detection and counter-detection made a startling assertion. Now, if anyone actually admitted to me they did that, the first thing I'd be thinking, Patrick, I have to say is Walter Mitty. And when you hear the rest of this, it may mean that Miami
my suspicions were correct. So this character that Peter met insisted that upon activation, the Patriot batteries delivered to Ukraine became immediately visible to Russian surveillance planes circling along the Russian and Belarusian borders, resulting in their almost immediate destruction or neutralization. This unexpected revelation, writes Peter, I think without any irony, got me thinking about the information I've been exposed to.
do you believe there is merit to his claim or should I set my dog on him? Well, you've definitely got to set your dog on him, Peter, the next time you see him, because I think we know a little bit about the Patriots, Patrick, having seen one in action in Kiev. But in a nutshell, they're
are definitely three Patriot batteries in Ukraine. Two are supposedly based in Kyiv and protecting the capital for obvious reasons. And the other one is roaming the Eastern Front. Well, it's roaming the whole country. But it has also been in action recently and knocked out a few really quite important Russian planes. And as a result of this, at least a bit of those batteries were knocked out by the Russians. So just to be clear, each Patriot
battery is based with three really key components. The engagement control station that's manned, a radar and six to eight launching stations. And it's probably three of these launching stations that have been knocked out. But as you can see, there are up to eight on each battery and therefore all three of those batteries will still be operational. Peter, next time you see this character, just let him know what I've told you.
Yeah, he sounds like this is a 21st century iteration of the kind of fantasies you used to get
back in the day who had been, who claimed to have been in the SAS. Now, if you put together all the guys I've met in my wanderings around wars, who claimed to have been in the SAS, it would be the size of the US Marine Corps. It's a very small elite unit. So yeah, that seems to be the modern version of that. I have to quickly say that our David Alexander absolutely does not fall into that category. He is the real deal. David is the real deal.
Just going to quickly deal with a query from Philip Minns, who was mentioning a reference I made in our Battleground 44 questions episode a week or so back when I referenced an amateur historian provided a
asked for some information about the makeup, the ethnic makeup of the Red Army during World War II. That was fascinating. He had all the facts and figures and numbers about the number of actual ethnic Russians compared to Ukrainians, Belarusians, and other Soviet nationalities. And Philip didn't quite catch the name of the person I was talking about. Well, his name is Andrei Zhanovsky, who, as I said, described himself as an amateur historian. Now, I came across
Andrei's research on the internet. So if you can track him down, I've actually just had another look, but I can't locate exactly where I found it, but I'm sure it'll pop up if you look hard enough. Lots of really interesting things
Before we go, we've had another fascinating message from a former serviceman, a man called Benjamin Hancock. He's an avid listener to what he describes as our brilliant Battleground podcast, but he's approaching us about something I'm very tempted to do, Patrick. I hope you will too. And that's support London Poppy Day this year on the 31st of October. And he's going to be talking about how to get people to support you.
It's an event that he started in 2006 when he just left the Grenadier Guards and couldn't find a poppy to buy in the city on the 1st of November, something that would have been considered a cardinal sin a few years earlier. Well, with an amazing and constantly expanding team of volunteers, they turned what
began as £500 takings in 2006 into £1 million by 2013. Well, the event's now run by the Royal British Legion. And last year, Ben's no longer involved, but last year they were still only turning over £1 million, which has made him quite disappointed that, you know, they hadn't actually made any more ground. So this year he's pulling some of the old guard back together to start the journey to turn this into a £5 million event.
operation by reinjecting, as he puts it, some of the fun and mystique. Well, the reason he's contacting us, Patrick, is because he's recruited Lord Peter Hendy, who's the chair of Network Rail, who was a great supporter whilst he was at TFL, Transport for London. And he's going to bring out and drive his route master bus on the day, which Ben wants to pack with a mix of historians, celebs, beneficiaries, et cetera. So the question is, will we go and join him that day on the bus?
And once we've done the tour, he's hoping we might run a panel session in one of the corporate offices in the city to an audience on something to do with the war remembrance, something to do with 1944, possibly, Patrick. So let's consider that. But I'm very tempted to do it. You know, I think if it's possible, Ben, we'll get back to you about this privately. But if it's possible, I think we'd love to join you. And it seems like a tremendous thing to do. So well done you.
Yeah, I'm in. I'm in for sure. Okay, that's it for us for this week. Do join us on Wednesday for another episode of Battleground 44, when we'll be continuing our series on the great warlords. I think we've got Churchill coming up this coming week. So with Andrew Roberts, so that's something you definitely got to tune into. And of course, on the following Friday, when we'll be digging into all things Ukrainian. Goodbye.