Frontline Special - The Times' Ukraine reporter in Kyiv, 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 with me Kate Jabot and this time we're joined by Maxim Tucker. Maxim is the Times' Ukraine correspondent. He's been reporting from the frontlines in Ukraine since 2022. And Maxim, you join us from Kiev right now.

Really interested to hear how it feels in Kiev and what the situation is on the ground, especially in the light of the political discussions that have taken place this week, where the first one between Trump and Putin, Putin said he would stop strikes on infrastructure. And that wasn't the experience on the ground.

Absolutely not. I think Ukrainians are very frustrated with Donald Trump going back to his US audience and saying, look, we've achieved a ceasefire on attacks on infrastructure. And then almost immediately attacks on infrastructure continue with the bombing in Slovyansk, cutting off electricity to a large part of that town. Drone attacks and missile attacks on Kiev, most of which were shot down. But another very loud night with lots of explosions outside this hotel.

And today, this morning, a major attack on a town called Krupnitsky, which again has cut off electricity supply. And what Putin seems to be focusing on is the railway infrastructure, cutting off electricity supply to the railway infrastructure, both in Dnipropetrovsk oblast and in Krupnitsky, those were targeted. And that's exactly what the ceasefire is supposed to be about, about protecting Ukrainian infrastructure. That's what Donald Trump has said he's achieved.

But the reality on the ground is very, very different. Does there seem to be a real disconnect between what the politicians are saying, the leaders are saying and the experience of the people? And do you get a real sense that there's awareness of that when they're going to these talks or they're just treating them as separate kind of entities?

I mean, I think there's such a divorce between the reality on the ground and what's being discussed now in Washington and what's being discussed in Moscow. They're so different. You know, the idea that Trump could...

praise himself basically for achieving some kind of ceasefire and you see immediately there were lots of comments in reaction to the US announcement that there was going to be a ceasefire on energy infrastructure, on attacks on infrastructure. A lot of people just saw the word ceasefire in America and said oh great I can't believe he's achieved it, Donald Trump has done this and obviously that was his intent to say they have achieved something.

Putin has not even played lip service to that. You know, within an hour, there were strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure and the Ukrainians are just wondering what is going on. How can we engage with that? And I think this is a question that I'll be looking at over the weekend is how diplomats are dealing with this on the ground when there is a kind of a fiction presented in Washington and in Moscow, you know, two major leaders now presenting this Russian narrative. How do you engage with it? Where do you start if the reality is something completely and utterly different?

That will be a dispatch that I'm looking forward to reading when it comes out. President Zelensky has also had a conversation with Donald Trump and says he now believes that lasting peace can be achieved this year under American leadership after speaking to Trump. Are there grounds, though, for optimism? Well, I think Ukraine now has to play this game. They've seen what's happened if Zelensky tries to challenge Ukraine.

Trump in the Oval Office meeting that was really acrimonious. You know, there's no contradicting him. This is the most powerful man elected by the American people. And he seems to have a mandate to do what he wants now. And Ukraine can't afford to use that, lose that U.S. support. So they're basically saying whatever they need to in order to hope that they get continued U.S. support in the meantime.

Ukraine is under no illusions that there is a ceasefire around the corner. I mean, Ukraine has also continued striking in retaliation. It's been striking Russian oil depots and having great success in that in the last couple of days. So they are not stopping what they're doing, but they're having to kind of pretend that they live in Donald Trump's reality and say, yes, OK, there's going to be great progress. Things are happening. Things are changing. Absolutely nothing is changing on

Yes. And Donald Trump's reality is that he has apparently suggested the idea of actually taking ownership or taking the run over the running of of Ukraine's nuclear facilities in order to protect or energy facilities in order to protect them from the Russians invading.

Is that serious? It's not serious. I mean, it's not workable. They don't have the expertise to do that. The Russians who have considerable expertise, who have the same nuclear power plants in Russia, have struggled with maintaining the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant because they don't know quite what...

grades have made, how it's run, how it's connected with the Ukrainian system over the last few decades. These are really challenging things to operate. And when the Russians are struggling to do it, it's very unlikely that the Americans will be able to come in with a completely different technology and run Ukraine's nuclear power plants. Also, whether Russia is prepared to give up Saperizhia, which is a, you know, the Russia, I think we need to, the starting point needs to be clear that Putin is still maximist in his demands. Everything he's asking for

is aimed to undermine Ukraine as a sovereign state. I mean, we see now discussions that maybe he's interested in Odessa. And that's, again, very far away from reality because there are no Russian troops anywhere near Odessa.

But the idea of taking a desert would be to deprive Ukraine of its biggest port and deprive it of a lifeline, an economic lifeline. So these are the kind of demands that Putin is making. And having Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, which provides a huge amount of energy to, had provided a huge amount of energy to Ukraine, would allow Ukraine to start rebuilding, to start its businesses working more effectively again. And I can't see that Putin is going to allow that to happen.

Of course, the big question now will be what comes next and how agreement of a ceasefire can be met or extended beyond halts on the attacks on energy and infrastructure, if and when those come.

Saudi Arabia talks could again turn everything on its head. Well, there will be a lot of talking, but it remains to be seen how that will actually play out on the ground. You know, this is the thing that Ukrainians are getting so frustrated with and diplomats are struggling to grapple with, that things are discussed, promised, and then they don't materialise on the ground. The Ukrainian ambition now, I think, is to play Donald Trump's game to counteract

You know, the same as everyone is having to do at the moment is this kind of very strange circus where everyone is dancing to a tune that is completely out of tune with reality. And if they don't do that, they'll lose the kind of the vital intelligence sharing, the vital military supplies that they're relying on.

And so they will have to go along with it. And I think, you know, there will be maybe some agreements, some statements made from that meeting. But, you know, how they are implemented is going to be really, really interesting. Even if you were to take this at face value, that there will be a ceasefire that only affects attacks on energy infrastructure. How on earth do you measure that? You know, with continued airstrikes night after night after night, how do you measure whether the Russians intended to hit something...

was infrastructure or was intending to hit something else, it's an impossible thing to measure. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians will

will be very obvious when the Ukrainians are hitting oil refineries and things. So the Ukrainian fear is that they will be prohibited from doing things that damage Russia's war effort, or Russia will just continue in the same vein and say, oh, we didn't target energy infrastructure. Maxim, one of your recent dispatches gave us a real insight into the fighting, the reality of what is going on in one of the flashpoints on the front line on this trip to south of Pokrovsk, where Ukrainian soldiers are holding the line. What was the situation on the ground when you were there?

So it's a very, you know, this is still a major flashpoint in the war. Ukrainian troops have been withdrawing from Kursk over the last couple of months and moving into the Pokrovsk sector to reinforce that area. There have been a few of the new Western trained brigades that were given very good equipment and, you know, solid training in the West that were not matched with experienced NCOs from the war in Ukraine. And actually, unfortunately, a lot of those collapsed, a lot of those men deserted.

and ran away when the Russians were attacking intensively. So a lot of experienced units had to be brought into the Pokrovsk sector to bolster that line. There have been some successful Ukrainian counterattacks pushing the Russians back. But again, now we see the Russians are intensifying their assaults around Pokrovsk. It's really important for the Russians to take Pokrovsk intact. This is why we're seeing that they're engaging on a flanking movement rather than a kind of the full frontal assault on the town that we've seen previously.

Because Russia has just erased town after town after town in its advance on Donbass. And that actually denies them of having any kind of logistics hub anywhere where they can kind of base their troops and push further on. So they're quite keen to take Pokrovsk as intact as possible.

Now, over time, obviously, that is looking more and more distant because they've had to bomb Pokrovsk over and over again. And, you know, there was another very large attack on Pokrovsk yesterday. And so something like 10 glide bombs hitting quite a small city every day, that's going to essentially eradicate it in the same way as other cities have.

And this is one of six flashpoints which is being heavily contested. Can you tell us a bit more about the conditions that the soldiers told you about, about the fighting and what they call the grey zone and the zero line? So they all talk about how the war changes very drastically every year.

And in the months, you know, their technological advancements, which are moving very, very quickly and soldiers struggling to keep up with them and they have life and death consequences on the battlefield. So the extension in range of FPV drones, batteries being more efficient, being able to carry heavier loads further means that there is now this gray zone of about 25 kilometers.

You know, Russian and Ukrainian troops can still be in very close contact inside that. But if they merge into the open in those areas, they have a 50% chance, they were saying, of being targeted and resulting in injury or death. So they just don't want to come above ground. The only way they can be resupplied is by aerial drops in those areas or somebody going in in the very early hours of the morning when the

because there's a grey light, which is difficult for drones to navigate. Or the same in the evening when there's this grey light that's difficult for the drones to spot people going in and out.

But it's something we see across the front lines is that logistics are the most difficult part of this warfare, because as soon as a truck, a vehicle comes out into the open to try and resupply someone in a forward position, then it gets attacked by FPVs. And there are so many FPV drones in the air constantly above these areas. It's very, very difficult. And the other thing that's really hard for the Ukrainians is to extract their wounded. I imagine this is the same for the Russians.

Again, you need a vehicle to go into, an armoured vehicle preferably, to take out Ukrainian wounded. And they are immediately targeted by drones. And you wrote about soldiers actually going in small groups, just in pairs and hiding underground.

Right, so this is the thing, the warfare has changed and this was something the North Koreans didn't learn at the beginning of their time in Kursk is that they were still attacking in classical infantry formation in large numbers and that makes you very, very easy to spot from the air. So what both the Russians and Ukrainians are doing is increasingly rely on smaller groups that will just

prevent some, present some kind of tripwire or some kind of defence in a frontline position, one or two soldiers to try and avoid detection, but to give some kind of support, kind of sitting in dugouts for days, weeks, sometimes months, even if they're stranded at a time being resupplied by these drones, waiting for a time to be rotated. And very often you hear stories of soldiers who have

I was supposed to go into this position for three days that was my mission but then we couldn't get anyone any supplies in we couldn't get any new troops out so I ended up being there for three months and they come back from these you know they've been shelled the whole time they've been underground the whole time they come back looking emaciated looking completely shell shocked and in a really bad state it's difficult to imagine people enduring this for for kind of

months and months and years at a time as this war grinds on. Did you actually meet soldiers when they'd just come back from that length of time in the dugout? You can see on their face they're completely pale, they look emaciated, they've got sunken eyes and a very distant stare, looking kind of really worried. And we met some of them in the command centre who'd just come back

from an assault um and you know the first thing they do is go to grab as much food as they can they're just wolfing it down but uh yeah not in a kind of very conversative state at that time one of the incentives that they are given um is a bonus for doing this a 30-day bonus payment how much is that factoring their willingness to do this and how much is it so i think it's um it's

it's important for them to have some kind of recognition of their service. This payment accumulates day after day. So 30 days, you know, you have to spend 30 days consecutively in order to get that payment. It gets counted as the payment

the more time you spend on the front line. I think it's an incentive for some, but not really a huge incentive for others, given how horrific it is in those circumstances. But Ukraine is increasingly trying to find ways to counter this massive wave of desertion. And one of those ways is to pay people more, including young people who are signing up now get a one-off payment of a million hryvnias, which is equivalent to about 20,000 pounds.

in order to join the military. And that is hoped to be a big incentive. And for some people living in very difficult circumstances in Ukraine, given the war economy is so problematic now, that is an incentive. But for others, they'd rather stay away from it. And for others who perhaps weren't given those incentives, you write that sometimes there's a bit of a feeling of a two-tier system for the new soldiers that are being recruited now. Right, and that was a very big problem that I encountered where soldiers who

signed up and they volunteered because they believed in defending Ukraine at the outset of war and they signed a contract not knowing how long the war would last, perhaps thinking it was going to be a few months. And the contract state that there will be a military service until the end of military activity.

And then, you know, after three years, they're not allowed to go home. They're not allowed to take a break. They're still getting the same pay with a few maybe increases, maybe a promotion because they've been alive for so long and they've been promoted through the ranks. But they are not getting the same advantages as people who sign up now, particularly young people who sign up now.

And there is some frustration, you know, where is the recognition for us, for the people who have been fighting because we believed in the country, not because we believed in money. Where is the recognition for us? Why do we get a different set of circumstances from the young people who are signing up now?

You mentioned the command centre that you visited near Budcroft. Can you just tell me a little bit more like what it was like inside and what kind of information was being processed? So these command centres, I've been in a few of them. They are normally underground. There's no natural light. They're trying to keep out any kind of spying eyes. So they're obviously fortified. They're usually pretty crowded. There's a lot of officers milling around looking at screens. There's huge banks of screens. A lot of technology is being processed here.

So they have drone feeds, multiple drone feeds from the battlefield in the areas above their troops, other drones that are hunting for the Russians, trying to identify where the Russians are. They have these applications with a huge amount of information from all over the battlefield, which show the kind of the last sighting of a Russian vehicle, the last sighting of a Russian position, the time and the date is on there. And then they have the imprints of their troops

So you see these kind of red lines where the Russians are thought to be green lines, where the Ukrainian troops are supposed to be yellow, where Ukrainian allied battalions might be. And then these kind of blue markers, which is like a Russian tank was last seen here at this time. So there might they might still be around. And the commanders have to process all of this data now. So the kind of the level of.

kind of mental acuity that is required for being an officer on today's battlefield is quite significant. And people who have learned this over time have become quite good at it without any kind of formal military education necessarily that they've just experienced.

And others find it completely overwhelming that they have to deal with all this information and they also have to look after the welfare of their men in the kind of traditional sense that you would as an officer and deploy people and move them around. And some of these, the pictures on the battlefield are quite astonishing. You know, there was one village that we were looking at on the screen and I was wondering how these green and red lines were intertwined. And it's because the Ukrainian troops were in some houses in the village and, you know, Russians could be in the house next door. And so this line was just...

mixed amongst each other. And the whole time, you know, they might occasionally engage each other in a firefight, but they're mostly underground trying to stay away from the drones. And the drones in the air are trying to spot whoever comes out and hit them with a grenade or a suicide attack as soon as they're out in the open.

The command centre that you were in was used to command the Da Vinci Wolves Battalion. Can you tell us a little bit more about these soldiers, where they came from? Because they're now officially part of or have been absorbed into the Ukrainian army, but they didn't start like that, did they? Right. So the leader of this battalion that we met is a guy called, his cosign is Filya.

And he was fighting for Ukraine against the Russians in 2014 as part of it, which was a kind of paramilitary formation. And these were young guys in their teens at the time who came together, football hooligans actually, who enjoyed their time at the terraces, liked a bit of a scrap, and then saw that the Russians were coming in and encroaching on their territory, killing their friends.

And they decided that they would join up and try and stop the Russians in the Donbass in 2014 when they were having this hybrid invasion. And they have been fighting ever since then. So they are very experienced. The original leader of this battalion, a guy who was called Da Vinci, was sadly killed in action towards the beginning of the war. And Filya has taken over command. He's a very experienced officer and his...

his force is regarded as, you know, very effective, very motivated fighters, and they've been incorporated within a brigade in the regular Ukrainian army. And it's interesting to speak to him because he has a kind of a different perspective on how the armed forces of Ukraine should be arranged. And those perspectives, I think, are now being recognized with a reform of the Ukrainian army into a court system.

Previously, Ukraine had arranged its defenses based on command being allocated to a certain area. So the priority was seen to be that the defense of that area was more important than the lives of the soldiers who were assigned to defend it. And officers were held accountable for losing territory in that area because the geographical areas what they're responsible for. The core system is designed to put soldiers at

the center of the Ukrainian army. So it's more important to preserve the lives of their men necessarily than hold onto a piece of territory that provides no strategic or tactical advantage. And we're looking now at how that is going to play out on the ground. There's one core that has been built and it's been assigned a general, Bilecki,

and how that's going to affect the war going forward. That's something we're going to be investigating in future dispatches. It's still in the very early days, but it could mean that a lot of lives are not wasted by Ukrainian generals who just want to hold onto a piece of land and they fight more in a smarter way to preserve their manpower and to

to focus on killing more Russians for losing less Ukrainian lives. And you wrote a bit about what this commander told you about what their experience, because he'd been fighting for 11 years himself, but what that kind of experience in fighting the Russians has brought to their experience

how effective they can be on the battlefield when you compare them to the more newly Western trained equipped soldiers. And you mentioned earlier about how they had to bring in more experienced forces from the Kursk region because of the problems they were having with these new brigades. But what kind of information and experience do they have they can impart and which Western militaries can learn about fighting the Russians? Well, I think one of the main things is their survivors. You know, they're people who fought since 2014 and survived and they've learned

you know, how ruthless you need to be on the battlefield, how to stay alive in these conditions. And they've gradually learned because they've been on the battlefield the entire time, how the drones work, how to negate the drones, how to avoid being detected. And those are all skills that are very important to be passed on by an experienced officer corps to, and you know, they're working with these complicated technologies as well at the same time.

and trying to make sure that all their men on the ground have internet, because this is an increasingly really important part of the way that communications are conducted. Some of the ways that orders are given to soldiers on the battlefield is that someone will swipe with a tablet a line, which is a kind of a marching order of where that's safe on the battlefield, where avoiding your minefields, avoiding enemy minefields, avoiding detection. That's how you move people around, almost like a computer game in some respects.

So people need to be familiar with how to do that. They also need to know, you know, how to teach and motivate people on the ground. And that's something I think the Western armies are struggling to keep up with. They have it all in theory, but how to do that when your command centre is being shelled, when you're losing guys on the ground. And, you know, it's a very different thing from having,

very good training and when you know that you're going to end up at the end of that alive from when your life is under kind of an existential threat. And can you stand and you stand out of cover and shoot your Kalashnikov at people encroaching on your position? And very often it's not the people that were good in the training class or good at absorbing the information that actually survive.

and go on to kind of teach people how to. It's only once you have that battlefield experience that you can see really who are good leaders and who are not. And you've got a very strong feeling the men would rather fight on than accept a bad peace deal, even if it was forced upon President Zelensky. What do you think would make them stop?

I think, well, obviously, if Russia was to withdraw from Ukraine, they would obviously stop at that point. You know, I think there is another complication here in the Da Vinci wolves and there are other brigades like Harte Brigade, Kraken. They have a complicated set of loyalties, actually, because they're funded often by kind of...

major businesses in their area, they have different loyalties necessarily and they've been to just President Zelensky. So if President Zelensky was to say, you know, we've got this bad peace deal but it's the best one we're going to have, it's not clear that people like that would accept that they had lost for 11 years their brothers in arms and would stop fighting the Russians and allow them to take over the territory that they've been fighting for for so long.

So I think it's difficult. They want to see Russia fought to a standstill, exhausted. You know, a lot of them feel that this is still possible. You know, if the West was to provide the substantial aid in a particular moment, a kind of surge in aid, then they still think that they could

overwhelm the Russians, you know, and hold their lines and maybe push them back slightly. But the Russian economy has been creaking for a long time. But you know, how long can it seriously last like this? And that's part of one of the reasons they're so frustrated, you know, they see at the moment, there are Ukrainian drone strikes every night now, against Russian oil refineries, that's the lifeblood of the Russian economy is being taken out every day.

They feel that they're having an effect. And now Trump is talking about a ceasefire on energy infrastructure, which would actually benefit the Russians. It's still very difficult to see a way out of all of this because, you know, they are determined to defend their land. Putin is still issuing these maximus demands, you know,

there does still doesn't seem to be a place where soldiers like this would accept um essentially a defeat in order to um have some kind of peace because they know that it would be short-lived and interesting because you said earlier that when you're in that command center you've been in several before um do you get a real sense as a reporter of deja vu i think they they are similar um

you have commanders doing similar things in different places. Every few months it evolves. So you see kind of better drones, clearer pictures there, you know, from the beginning of the war, there may be a few feeds, some camera feeds. Now, you know, Command Center is an entire bank of screens. There are screens everywhere, huge screens,

with so much data presented on it. It's fascinating the kind of granular detail that they have, the information that they can have on the battlefield. When I was in Sumy, there was one commander who was, he was scrolling through his tablet showing me the different Ukrainian positions and he pointed out this guy was wounded and they had the information about he was wounded when he was reported wounded. You know, he kind of had roughly a good idea of how long he could

he could hold on for before he would die. They didn't know whether they'd be able to get him out, but they have this kind of information.

And it is astonishing to see the technology that's being used. And, you know, I was in a classroom yesterday and they'd be writing about this in the forthcoming dispatch where soldiers are being trained in electronic warfare because, you know, it's become a cliche to talk about this drone war. But really, that is how, you know, it's not rifles anymore. It's drones that how ordinary soldiers are fighting each other with drones. And that means that electronic warfare is incredibly important. Your ability to jam the opposition's drones.

and this is kind of sophisticated stuff so people are having to learn physics and maths in classrooms and these are guys who were kind of farmers yesterday or you know had a butcher shop and they've been allocated been chosen for some reason they still don't have very good selection criteria by their officers to go and attend this electronic warfare class and the teacher that was talking to me said like I've been learning this field for six years to kind of get my knowledge of radio frequencies and what does what

And I have to teach these guys in 23 days and their lives depend on it. And it's a really interesting mismatch between the kind of

your average expectation of a soldier and what kind of education they need to now having to navigate this very complicated technology in the battlefield and to navigate it very quickly otherwise you die. On the political side of things, Sir Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, is holding a meeting in London today of the so-called Coalition of the Willing and the idea of assembling troops to support any ceasefire seems a long way off if ever possible at the moment.

The EU is also expected to be reiterating its commitment to coordinating support for Ukraine today, taking steps to make billions of euros worth of military aid available, pursue peace through strength.

What exactly do you think is needed for Ukraine from Europe to secure its survival? And can it do it without the US if the US does become absent? Well, I think it's really it is really important to have a contingency plan. You know, if there is a ceasefire, what is it going to look like? How do we ensure it's a lasting ceasefire and not, you know, like the ceasefires after 2014, which were just violated and violated?

And having a presence of European troops there, I'm sure, would make a difference to the Russian calculations of whether they would violate a ceasefire and how they would do it. So I think those are really important plans. Obviously, there is no European country which has enough troops at the moment to kind of single handedly counteract

that. So they need to come together and they need to find a way to operate together. You know, it's a very, very large front line. So we are talking about tens of thousands of troops, whether 30,000 can be enough, I'm not sure. I think what they really need is to make sure that the

the Polish come on board. I mean, this is a huge armed force and they have a lot to lose if Ukraine capitulates and Russian forces are on their border. But, you know, they have a really strong force in that part of the world. So they need to be fully on board with this. You know, I think the air power thing is something that really needs to be looked at because air power is something that

I think Europe as a whole is still going to be much stronger, has more sophisticated, more advanced technology in the air than the Russians.

And how to safeguard Ukrainian airspace is a really important discussion to be having. More important, I think, than troops on the ground, which maybe provide a deterrent. But if it actually comes to a ceasefire being violated, what are they going to do? Planes in the air can shoot down Russian missiles, can shoot down Russian drones without necessarily putting themselves in a great deal of harm. So that is...

That, I think, is really important. Those discussions happen. I think it's right that the EU is looking to step up its defence spending. And really, Ukraine at the moment is the best way to defend Europe because Europe just doesn't have the troop numbers. Ukraine does. Ukraine has about a million men in armed service at the moment. And some of those are very motivated. Some of them are experienced.

These are the guys who are learning how to fight the Russians. European forces don't know. They learn some lessons and some of the special forces that are in Ukraine have learned lessons about how to fight the Russians. But as an armed force as a whole, they don't know how to fight Russia. They don't know this new form of warfare. And they're going to rely on the Ukrainians to teach them that and to integrate with them.

So I think that it's beneficial for European forces to help Ukraine hold the line. And it's important for them to integrate with Ukrainian forces as much as possible to learn the lessons of how it is to fight Russia. Maxime, it's been great talking to you. Thank you so much for your time. I better let you get back to writing your next dispatch. Look forward to seeing it. All the best. Thanks very much, Kate. You've been watching Frontline for Times Radio with me, Kate Chabot. If you'd like to be the first to get exclusive content, you can sign up for membership with the link below.

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