What’s unfolding in Ukraine?
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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. Today with me, Alex Dibble and Stuart Willey. Amid all of the major conflicts going on in the world, it's easy to see why some analysts and many Ukrainians fear Russia's invasion of Ukraine has become the forgotten war. More than 1,200 days since the full-scale invasion, the war continues, and Vladimir Putin's summer offensive is pushing up the tempo. And

Add in the US halting shipments of weapons, and it's clear why concerns about Ukraine's prospects are growing. Today, we are going to look into what's been unfolding over the past few weeks with our reporter in Kyiv, Tom Ball. Tom, while attention has been on Iran and events elsewhere, Ukraine has been seeing some of the most fierce bombardments of the war. Can you just tell us what's been going on?

Yeah, that's right. Over the weekend, the Russians launched more than 500 drones and missiles across Ukraine, which was a record-breaking figure. But it does come amid a dramatic escalation in the nightly bombardments of Ukraine. President Zelensky said an extraordinary statistic the other day that since the start of the full-scale invasion over three years ago now,

Russia has fired 10% of Shahed drones at Ukraine just in June alone. And that was not even by the end of the month then. So this is largely being driven by Shahed drones, which are smaller, which carry a warhead of between one and four kilograms. So they're not as...

They're not as damaging as missiles, but the sheer quantity that they're now firing them at means that the Russians are trying to overwhelm Ukraine's defenses, essentially, and enable some of those to get through and to hit their targets and...

As ever, since the start of the invasion, the purpose of this really is just to try and break public morale. That's an extraordinary figure. One in 10 of those Iranian-designed drones sent over in this three-year war have come just in the last month.

Tom, as well as breaking public morale, do the Shahid drones do a lot of physical damage? I went to go and visit an apartment block just outside Kiev on Saturday.

And they'd had, Shahed hit them about a week previously. They're pretty nasty. They will take out up to a dozen apartment flats and they are often filled now with small ball bearings which will disperse upon impact. Fortunately, in this instance, there were no casualties, but they do frequently kill people when they hit these targets.

And while this amount of firepower is being sent by Russia, Russia's also taking something of a victory lap, isn't it? How big a deal is this announcement by Russia that the occupied Luhansk region is now fully under their control? It's symbolically important. Luhansk is one of the two regions which make up Donbass, which has been the focal point of their military campaign since 2014. But for several weeks now, Deep State, which is the

mapping service run by the Ukrainians, which shows the front lines, has shown Luhansk to be virtually all but captured. So it's something that Putin would be very pleased to have been able to announce, but the writing's been on the wall for a few weeks now. Of course, the status of Luhansk has long been one of Moscow's red lines in peace talks. What do you make of the White House envoy, Keith Kellogg,

claiming that Russia may be stalling for time in those peace talks over the war in Ukraine. It's been stalling for time for months now. I mean, ever since Trump came into the White House and said that he was going to end the war within 24 hours, the Russians have been playing a game whereby they've been giving the impression that they are willing to sit down and talk and engage while, on the other hand, having absolutely no intention whatsoever and continuing to

continuing to bomb and strike Ukrainian cities every night, continuing to take losses of up to a thousand men on the front lines each day. So Kellogg's absolutely right, but it's been the case for months now. So no real progress on the push for a ceasefire. And as we said, Russia keeps advancing.

With this fairly grim background, then, you've been talking with Petro Poroshenko. He's a high-profile former Ukrainian president, a political rival to Volodymyr Zelensky. And he had some fairly strident criticism, didn't he, for the Ukrainian president? He did. Essentially what he was saying was that Zelensky is behaving in an increasingly authoritarian manner...

The backdrop to this is the fact that Poroshenko was sanctioned earlier this year by the government, which essentially prevents him from running in any future election whether to be one. His criticism was that Zelensky was attempting to take out all of his political competitors, essentially.

He was trying to present the fact that he was, you know, not wanting to be critical, but rather to give Zelensky advice, acknowledging the fact that what is so crucial currently is that Ukrainians stand united. But occasionally that, or more than occasionally that, advice as he would call it, did seem to appear much more criticism than counsel. And particularly he was critical of the way in which Zelensky and his team had worked

with the Trump administration over peace talks and said that they'd made many bad mistakes, that there was a serious communication problem, that the Americans didn't trust some of Zelensky's team. He essentially said that the Ukrainian negotiating team didn't have a kind of clear enough understanding of the fact that Trump more than anything wants to have international adulation of the people for having secured this grand diplomatic coup of Ukraine.

being able to claim that he was the one that brokered the ceasefire. And so he suggested that the Zelensky team should have been perhaps more understanding of that and more willing to compromise and make gains later on. And in that, he said that Zelensky could learn from Enyahu. Well, Tom, we've actually got a recording of that part of your interview. Why don't we take a listen to that now? Learn the experience of Bibi, of Matanyahu.

I know Netanyahu. And Trump make a pressure on Netanyahu to make extremely unpopular in Israel certain decision, including the finished war with Iran, softening the war in Gaza, with Hamas and everything. But Trump want to have an experience that he can stop the war. And Netanyahu give him this opportunity. And what he receiving in return? American bomba

In the Iranian sky. Why it's so important? Because actually that was a message. American in the war. And if you're asking me what message I want to have from Americans, American is in the war.

That was Petro Poroshenko speaking to you, Tom. And there are some doubts today as to that American commitment to the war. The White House says it's halted deliveries of some weapons, especially missiles, to Kiev. Is there a risk Trump may just walk away as he's threatened to? I asked Poroshenko about this and his response was absolutely not that Trump...

wouldn't walk away. And my feeling also is that Trump probably wouldn't, you know, that would be on his reputation for forever had he been the person that walked away and ceased to engage in the biggest European war since the Second World War. But it is true that it's becoming, it has become increasingly difficult to convince Trump that Ukraine is worthy of his interest and his

So that's what Zelensky and his team are currently working on. And I think there was some optimism coming out of the NATO summit last week where Trump and Zelensky did have a conversation and afterwards Trump described it as having, couldn't have been nicer, I think was the phrase that he used. Tom, did you get a sense from your conversation that Poroshenko is kind of positioning himself to be a go-between with Trump or a kind of positional

potential president in a post-Zelensky world where Trump does provide that kind of support? I think he's certainly trying and has been trying to position himself as somebody who can speak for Ukraine in Washington. He had a couple of diplomatic coups of his own when he was president. The Crimean Declaration, which

Mike Pompeo, who was the then Secretary of State, signed an affirmation that America didn't recognise Russia's claim to the Crimea, which is a big thing at the time. He also convinced Trump to become the first US president to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine in 2017. So I think he sees those achievements as giving him a certain level of authority. And it was reported earlier this year that Palashenko had been to Washington and had met with members of Trump's team. So...

That now is going to be more difficult for him because of the sanctions that he's under, which prevent him from travelling. And that was one of the big points that he was making, saying that by putting me under sanction, you are...

hampering my efforts to try and do what's best for Ukraine. Okay, Tom, thank you. The Times reporter Tom Ball speaking with us from Kiev. There's been widespread criticism of the Pentagon move to halt US weapons shipments to Ukraine. And for more on what's going on inside the US Department of Defense, listen back to our episode from last week called The President, the Pentagon and the Leak.

And remember to follow the world intent so you can stay on top of the world every day. See you tomorrow.

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