234. The War in Ukraine in 2024
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Hello and welcome to this year-ending episode of Battleground with me, Patrick Bishop, and Saul David. In this last offering, we'll be ranging over the big moments in the conflict in all its various dimensions and trying to see what they tell us about how 2025 will unfold. We leave the old year and enter the new one in a very febrile atmosphere, charged with the feeling that the end may be drawing near for good or for bad.

Will 2025 see a cessation of hostilities of some sort in Ukraine? We'll be gazing into our crystal ball, as well as ranging over the great shaping events of 2024 on the military, political and diplomatic fronts. But Saul, let's start with the battlefield. What did it look like a year ago? Well, we all remember, don't we, Patrick, the much vaunted Ukrainian summer offensive in 2023. And that, for a few heady moments,

seemed like it might bring a breakthrough in the collapse of the Russian forces. Well, by the end of the year, of course, that's a distant memory. It had failed essentially because Russia was too well dug in to be swept aside by a Ukrainian force that basically lacked enough weight to punch through. I mean, there was that time delay, of course. It didn't actually start until the summer. It probably should have been launched in the spring. And by that time, by the summer, the Russians had built this incredibly sophisticated series of defences, huge minefields.

tank traps and all kinds of other defensive systems that made it almost impossible for the Ukrainians, even with their new Western tanks, to actually get through. So by the end of the year, the Russians were engaged in their own offensive in the Donetsk area, and that wasn't going well. They looked pretty bogged down in their efforts to capture a key communications hub, and that was the very heavily defended town of Avdivka in the center of Donetsk Oblask.

There were reports of staggering casualties and morale was suffering. Nonetheless, the assault continued and on the 17th of February of this year, it fell after the Ukrainian defenders withdrew. A reported 16,000 Russians died in the attempt to capture it.

Well, this was a big moment, wasn't it? I mean, can we, looking back now, can we see this as a turning point in the war in retrospect? Yeah, we didn't know it at the time, did we, Patrick? We thought this is just another, you know, back moot and that probably after it, after incurring enormous numbers of casualties, and in some ways, people were saying, you know, if this was Zaluzhny, that is the Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander Zaluzhny's

It wasn't a bad one, basically allowing the Russians to beat their heads against a brick wall. Meanwhile, the more nimble Ukrainian forces would choose their time to strike. But in reality, apart from the incursion into Kursk in August, and I'm sure we'll talk about that in a bit more detail, Ukraine's been on the defensive ever since.

But political events off the battlefield didn't help either, did they, Patrick? No, not at all. I mean, this was an example of how the role of the United States has been all important in shaping this war. This was a period when, of course, with the flow of arms from across the Atlantic looked in danger of drying up. And that was thanks to Republicans in the Senate blocking a bill. The whole process began just over a year ago, 6th of December, and

at the end of last year. And that bill, of course, was going to provide emergency spending to support Ukraine. And that political domestic conflict dragged on until the end of April. So it wasn't until

the end of April this year that the vote finally went through but by then of course the damage had been done that was down to the Republicans but the Biden administration imposed his own restrictions on Ukraine as we frequently pointed out on the pod and we'll be going into that a bit later on but that certainly did a key of no favors either but going back to that sort of blockage in the flow of arms there's no doubt that the Ukrainians really suffered as a result of that you

There were reports of having to ration units to firing only 2,000 artillery rounds a day. That was compared to an estimated 10,000 rounds that the Russians were firing back at them. But just getting back to the actual flow of events on the battlefield, the capture of Avdiivka was followed by

An ambitious attempt by Russia to claw back territory lost in the Kharkiv region, wasn't it, Soren?

And the city of Kharkiv, which is often seen as a Russian city in terms of it being Russian speakers there, is clearly a kind of major objective for the Russians. Well, in that offensive, they managed to capture a dozen villages. Ukraine said on the 17th of May, that's just a week later, that its forces had slowed down the Russian advance. And this was followed a couple of weeks later in early June when the White House said that the offensive had stalled.

and was unlikely to advance farther. So it wasn't really that successful, the Kharkiv offensive. However, the Russians did do better in the Donetsk area and continue to do so to this day, launching an offensive towards another important strategic position at Chassiv Yar, west of Bakhmut. They've also made steady but very costly progress ever since and are currently closing in on Prokofs.

which we mentioned many times on the pod and which would be quite a prize if it fell, but it's worth pointing out that it still hasn't fallen. Again, we're going back to the sort of back mood scenario. But then we saw something which took everyone, particularly the Russians, by surprise, didn't we? Which once again showed the Ukrainians' ability to come up with unexpected maneuvers to break out of dangerous situations. Yeah, no, that was a sort of high point of the year for Ukraine and for Ukraine supporters.

And that was 6th of August when they launched their first direct offensive into Russian territory, which was just over the border, of course, at Kursk, into the Kursk Oblast. There was a kind of lightning advance that captured the town of Sudzha, which is quite an important strategic town, so the foreign gas pipeline runs through it. And that fell on the 15th of August. They were actually pushing to some extent to an open door because another example of Kursk

Russian lack of foresight and the rickety-ness basically of the whole regime is the fact that there were very few experienced units positioned along the border. And so they were able to, the Ukrainians were able to quickly seize territory in this first phase of the incursion. Now this forced Russia to divert some thousands of troops from occupied Ukrainian territory to try and shore up their defenses there. But

The crucial problem for Ukraine was that they weren't being moved from the Donetsk area where most of the pressure was on them. So one of the main objectives of the campaign had failed. That was it was a calculated move to try and get them to shift forces.

from these intense combat areas in Donetsk up to Kursk. But nonetheless, there were some good results of that, which they still hold on to. They still have a big chunk of, a reasonably big chunk of Russian territory. And of course, the point of that is to trade off in a future negotiation. It has to be said that territory is shrinking all the time. It does, of course, provide a bit of a sort of buffer zone as well. But

Generally, you know, the picture is not good, is it? The situation is slowly deteriorating in the Donbass, where despite these horrendous losses, the Russians are grinding on. That's right. Just to return to the Kursk incursion for a second, Patrick, it's interesting. I was looking back at my notes that we were writing at that time, and we were, of course, speculating what it was all intended to be.

Was it an attempt to divert Russian troops from their attacks in occupied Donetsk? You know, might it lead to an even bigger incursion? We didn't know, but we did get a little bit of a clue. And it's worth reminding ourselves about this from Mikhail Podolyak, an advisor to Zelensky, who said at the time Ukrainian operations in Russian border regions would improve security.

Kiev's position in any future peace talks with Moscow. Really interesting, isn't it? That even at the time they were beginning to think in terms of peace negotiations. We'll come on to that, you know, where these might go in a moment. This is well before Moscow.

Trump's victory in the US, but already I think there was a kind of sense in Ukraine, certainly in Zelensky's presidential office, that at some stage they were going to have to negotiate their way out of this war and they wouldn't be able to regain all their territory by force. But yeah, just returning to your point about the Russian advance continuing, it is. It's

big chunks. And losses have been very heavy indeed. Not that that seems to make any difference. It's absolutely extraordinary. The ability of the Russian army to just lose vast numbers of men, pay huge sums, comparatively speaking, of course, to get more soldiers and still be plodding on. But as we've said many times, Patrick, both of us don't see this as sustainable in the long term. Now, the current intention of the Russians clearly is to get their hands on Pokrovsk,

But whether its capture would lead to a wider breakthrough any more than any of the previous captures of places like Bakhmut and Abivka would lead to a wider breakthrough is not clear. And we doubt it, to be truthful. The pattern seems to be that Ukraine holds on as long as it can, then falls back to another defense line, and the process starts all over again. And we saw it, as I just mentioned, in Bakhmut, Abivka, and then Vuludar, which had been held by Ukraine's 72nd Mechanized Brigade,

and fell this year on the 1st of October. So do you see any change in the situation, Patrick, before Trump gets into office? I don't really, no. I think it's still quite dynamic, given it's the depths of winter now, isn't it? The front lines are still pretty active.

But you were talking about the sustainability of it. And it really is, you know, you can't really overemphasize the scale of the casualties. Here we are in the 21st century. We've got kind of First World War levels of killing and maiming on both sides, this is. We've just got some new figures out for Russia. The latest were issued the other day by, literally a couple of days ago, by Ukrainian authorities saying,

who are sometimes accused of exaggerating the numbers, and with good reason, I suppose, or it's right that we should be sceptical. But in this case, the figure they come up with, which is around 770,000 killed and wounded, has been backed up by the British Ministry of Defence, which has a history of being not exactly cautious, but cautious.

obviously striving for accuracy. So I think we can take that as being a pretty accurate figure. And on the Ukrainian side, the Ukraine has actually been quite open or more open, shall we say, about their losses. And in November, Zelensky's office admitted to 43,000 killed

Now, other estimates put it higher, 60,000 from one independent calculation from a sympathetic source. The Wall Street Journal put it at 80,000 killed and 400,000 wounded just up to September. Now, given the human resources available to Ukraine are much smaller than those that Russia can call on,

That is a massive number, isn't it? And we've reported often enough on the sagging spirits of the frontline soldiers. There have been endless complaints about the slow rate of rotation. Some units are doing months at a time in combat without leave. Massive difficulties actually getting people back

into battle in the first place, which the Ukrainian authorities, I think we all agree, have been quite slow to address by, for example, lowering the age of conscription, which is something that the Americans have been calling for. And again, something you commented on, often this distinct lack of enthusiasm among significant sections of the male population who are not lining up to do their bit.

But so this is a real consideration, isn't it? So maybe the crucial consideration. How do you see this going forward? Well, it's almost certainly not going to improve, is it? Zelensky's kind of caught in a trap here, really. I mean, politically, it's almost impossible for him to spread the net wider. They've been trying to use coercion. They've been, you know, hoping more people will volunteer, but they aren't prepared to reduce the level of conscription, even though the Americans and others have been calling for that.

I mean, I think what's happening here, Patrick, is that the war is becoming increasingly less popular in terms of people determined to fight to the finish among ordinary Ukrainians. And you can see that with the percentage of people who are prepared to fight on until they've recovered all their ground. I mean, those numbers are falling all the time. And the numbers supporting a negotiated peace are going up. So,

clearly Zelensky from political perspective feels that he does need to negotiate some kind of peace. But he's also accepted if he does inevitably, not least because of the moon music coming out of the, the Trump administration or what will be the Trump administration, it's going to be unpopular. You know, he,

clearly can't win here. But he said recently something very telling, which I think we've already mentioned. We're not strong enough to recover all our force by land. We'll have to rely on negotiations instead. I mean, good luck with the negotiations recovering some of this land, I have to say. But I think they may have to accept, as we've mentioned many times, that they will lose some of their land and hopefully get some kind of security guarantee that will allow them to feel reasonably secure in the future.

More of that later. So that's it for this half. Join us in part two when we'll be looking to Russia and dusting off our crystal ball to see what 2025 portends.

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Welcome back. Okay, let's switch to events in Russia, shall we? It hasn't been a great year for Vladimir Putin all in all, has it, Patrick? And yet he continues to defy gravity by apparently maintaining an iron grip on power. Yeah, if you look back to the year before last, to 2023, Putin looked shakier then, didn't he? We had the Prigozhin mutiny, where that looked pretty bad for him. That looked like it might be curtains. Yet,

Here he still is. He does seem to be able to soak up endless humiliations. And, you know, just looking at it logically, looking at it as historians, we think he's sitting on very shaky foundations. Now, let's just start with the home front.

Now, regular listeners will have been hearing this debate going back and forth with people saying, well, it's not as bad as all that. You know, we had a listener last week telling us that we were being wildly optimistic about the chances of the Russian economy collapsing anytime soon. But, you know, we're sticking to our principles.

Our premise that, you know, you just look at the numbers, you look at everything that's going on there, it can't go on in its current form. You've got inflation, which is pumped up by the huge amount of money being spent on defense. All this is not sustainable in the long term. Sanctions, you know, often decried. Well, they're certainly doing some damage, and I would say they're going to be almost certainly used as a lever in Trump's peace plan strategy.

On the other hand, I think we can say that war hasn't really come home to the general population or the population that matters politically in the big cities in terms of these massive casualties. They haven't really made the impact you might think they would have done. And that's, I think, largely due to the disproportionate number of those doing the dying and not from these more politically sensitive places, but from the poor regions, the outlying regions,

And many of the casualties are from ethnic groups inside the Federation, very far from the centers of power, you know, thousands of miles from Moscow and Petersburg,

And as we heard in the last part, you know, in the eyes of the ruling class, these are disposable humans. They've got little economic or social value in this cynical calculation of the Putinistas. And then, of course, there's no opposition. Everyone's either in prison or killed or they've fled. Alexei Navalny, who was really the last president,

who could perhaps be a pole for opposition to gather around to oppose Putin in a sort of classical fashion.

political way rather than him just being toppled by some of his henchmen. He's dead, of course. He'd heroically gone back to Russia after surviving an assassination attempt by poison. And there, of course, he was arrested, dispatched to the Polar Wolf penal colony in the frozen northern

died on the 16th of February this year, almost certainly at the behest of Vladimir Putin. Just on this subject, I'm going on a bit, but I just want to say this because it's important. I went to an exhibition the other day at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith in London, and it was called Faces of Russian Resistance, documenting some of the thousands of political prisoners banged up in Putin's

It was, I must say, absolutely heartbreaking. They've just got portraits, simple portraits of some of the men and women who are in Putin's jails and details of the trumped up prisoners.

they were accused of and the savage punishments that have been inflicted on them. Now, I was struck by the fact they came from right across the social spectrum. You had old age pensioners, intellectuals, you have firemen, you have policemen, just ordinary folk sickened by the war. And I think we sometimes forget the sacrifice and the bravery and the suffering of these heroes and these heroines. And we'll be returning shortly.

to the subject in the new year. But you've only got to look at Russian history to see that the end usually comes swiftly and unexpectedly. So Putin, who thinks of himself as a great scholar of Russia's past, can take a little comfort, I think, from looking back at the fate of previous autocrats. But there's been real damage done to him internationally, hasn't there, Saul? He can't get away from that, and that must cause him some pain, given this dream he has of establishing Russia.

as a global superpower and a leader with China of a new multipolar world order.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, we think back, of course, to the famous BRICS summit at the end of October in Kazan, Russia, which was hosted by Putin and meant to showcase his standing in the world. And then, of course, followed shortly after by the battlefield partnership with North Korea. And it all sounded reasonably encouraging, didn't it, for his creation of a new world order? Well, the hollowness of these pretensions was revealed when Iran, one of the sort of

key supporters of Russia in its war, both in military terms and certainly in diplomatic and political terms, was humiliated. Iran was humiliated by Israel's campaign against its client, Hezbollah, and then by the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. So that's another piece of the wall, so to speak, removed because

Two of its closest allies, Syria and Iran, really have been, if not taken out of the game, certainly put back in their box for the immediate future. And Syria may be a real issue for Putin in the longer term because his bases allowed him to project

power into Africa and, of course, the Mediterranean, which is what the Russians have been wanting, frankly, for the last 300 years. So it was quite a coup to get those bases. We don't know what's going to happen with them because we haven't heard definitely what the Syrian opposition want to do. The Russians are hoping they can negotiate to stay there. But I suspect that's pretty unlikely, I have to say, Patrick. Yeah. But all this weakness doesn't really help Ukraine unless they've got corresponding support from America in the West, does it?

And we've got to have a very mixed picture here. And I think you feel very strongly about this. We mentioned the Republicans blocking the arms package, but the Biden administration hasn't actually covered itself with glory either, has it? I mean, the support's always been too little, too late. A lot of good rhetoric on the delivery, you know, not so hot. Of course, the glaring example is those restrictions imposed

which dominated a lot of our discussions, didn't it, Saul, on the use of long-range Atacams missiles that could hit deep inside Russia. And then, of course, the pressure that the White House put on Britain and France, which prevented them from independently giving the green light to Kiev for the use of their storm shadow and scalp.

cruise missiles to be used more effectively by targeting deep Russian assets. So very strange, I think, in retrospect, when we look back at it. You know, Biden seemed to be pretty cowed, didn't he, by all that Putin nuclear saber-raffling.

And I think it was, I think you can say it was Biden because I think the story seems to be that it was his caution that was really driving American policy. And the story is coming out now about his mental capacity. We all knew he wasn't sort of playing with a full deck, but nonetheless, he seems to have been absent from the event for quite large periods of time. Maybe that had something to do

to do with it. So as a commander in chief, which of course the American president is, I think he was found lacking. But how harshly do you think history is going to judge him, Sean? Pretty harshly, to be truthful, Patrick. I mean, either he's directly responsible for the US being cowed by Putin's nuclear saber rattling, as you put it, or he's allowed his advisors to convince him of that. But either way, the buck...

stops with him, doesn't it? The only possible get out he's got is the mental incapacitation. We'll never really know, in truth, the extent to which that affected his decision making. I mean, certainly his decisions this year have been pretty much on a par with

The previous year, and in fact, the year before that, Patrick, because as we've seen, they've been very slow all along the line. The Americans in particular, the British were better, but the Americans in particular, to actually give authorization for things like their main battle tanks, the F-16 fighters, and of course, the permission to use their weapons illegally.

either against targets that are close to the border with Russia or indeed later on deeper into Russia. So, you know, there's been this dragging of the feet all the way along the line. And I don't really see that Biden can escape responsibility for that. But at the same time, Europe hasn't done that much better, has it?

I would say they have, actually. I think both in terms of diplomatic support, it's been much more solid. Obviously, you can't talk about Europe as being one bloc. But let's just say Britain, you know, Keir Starmer inherited the Tory position on Ukraine, which was very supportive. And he certainly hasn't wavered from that.

Just across the establishment Times newspaper the other day, splendid editorial applauding the assassination of General Igor Kirillov, who we spoke about last week. That's the head of Russia's nuclear, biological and chemical forces. A spectacular hit. And of course, they're

A robust editorial earned a hysterical denunciation from the Putin poodle-cum-attack-dog, Dmitry Medvedev, in which he threatened the editors with death. So moving across, I mean, France has been very strong, although, of course, looking forward, Macron is in a very weak position.

And it may well be that he is not president by the end of the year. And presidential elections, as things stand, could well bring Marine Le Pen and the National Rally leader to power, which could change France's stance quite considerably. Italy's turned out to be quite strong. I'll come on to that. But Germany, of course, is a mixed picture. You've got the coalition led by Czechoslovakia,

Chancellor Olaf Scholz has just collapsed. But their record was, you know, again, a little bit patchy. They're still living under the shadow of the Second World War, aren't they? The historical relationship, the guilt they feel about what they did to Russia still hangs over them. So,

Things like the Taurus missile, which could actually, as we were saying last week, bust the Kerch Bridge. That still hasn't been handed over. But there are elections coming up this year, so things may change. You've got a possible outcome would be a victory. The main winner would be the CDU, Christian Democrats coming out on top and forging a coalition, perhaps, with Scholz's party. But they've made pretty positive noises recently.

about Ukraine. So let's hope that that's the case. Italy, as I mentioned, Giorgia Maloney, who people thought might be a weak sister and all this, turns out actually to be pretty tough. She faced down the pro-Russians on the right, on the Italian right. Donald Trump is a great admirer of her. She's a feisty, working-class Italian woman.

And she's now the most prominent leader in Europe. Who'd have thought that a year or two ago? Brava, as they say. Brava, as they say in Italy. So maybe she can persuade Trump to take a tough line. But in general, there's been, I think the one positive thing is that everyone has got this wake up call about NATO, haven't they? So they've got to put their hands in their pockets and they can't leave it to the Americans to basically underwrite everything.

Yes, that's right. And this goes all the way back, of course, to Trump's previous presidency when he made the point that, you know, given that it was expected that every member of NATO would spend at least 2% of GDP, only four or five would.

were doing it at that stage. Well, now it's over 20. So there has been a big change. And we should also mention, Patrick, we had the addition to NATO, its 32nd member with Sweden this year. So it's been strengthened. Certainly, its position vis-a-vis Russia has made it more difficult for Russia to cause mischief. In other words, if

Putin's long-term aim was actually to weaken NATO. He's done the opposite of that. And NATO itself, certainly European NATO, seems to be much stronger. So if there's one good thing that's come out of this war, it's been that. Right. Now it's time to get out of the crystal ball and peer into its murky depths. Look, in 18 days' time, Donald Trump will be in the White House. And, of course, we ought to remind listeners that we're going to be there. We're going to be in Ukraine to record this historic moment

So let's start off by asking the fundamental question. So what do you think Ukraine's position is going to be when Trump starts his great sort of peace initiative? Now, we've seen a lot of repositioning already from Zelensky, haven't we? He's been very active on the diplomatic front, signaling basically that he's ready to do business.

My calculation, as we mentioned before, Patrick, is that this is the last throw of the dice for Zelensky. He feels that negotiations are inevitable. His people, that is the Ukrainian people, are not right behind this war in terms of fighting it to its bitter end. So they need to get out of it with the best kind of deal they can. And I think Zelensky's calculation is go along with Trump, go along even with what is

certainly a year ago would have been a pretty humiliating piece, which is freezing it on the current lines and losing at least 20% of Ukrainian territory. Do all of that in the hope that Putin actually is going to not accept that. He's grinding forward. He's beginning to think in the more maximalist aims that he had at the start of the war. There's a lot of talk still, even in the press conference Putin gave yesterday, I think it was, in which he's saying, no, no, we want to get back to war.

the reasons we started this war in the first place. And if you remember, Patrick, that was effectively the destruction of Zelensky's regime. I think Zelensky's hoping that Putin will overplay his hand. And as a result, the Americans will come in on his side with full backing, which will give him the opportunity either to win the war or to renegotiate in a better situation down the line. But what about Putin, Patrick? What do you think?

Well, I think that's not a bad calculation. I mean, he's...

Putin has put himself in a very difficult position, hasn't he? He can't really make the concessions that will make it possible for Trump to deliver a swift deal of the sort he's been promising. So he's a prisoner of Putin that is of his own rhetoric in that sense. He's essentially staked his survival on achieving something he can call a victory in Ukraine. And I think just freezing the lines won't do it unless there comes with it a complete relaxation of sanctions,

and really a kind of restoration of the international status quo ante. I don't see how that's really politically possible for Trump to agree to. It won't really sit with his own image of himself, for one thing. You know, he's the great dealmaker. This is emphatically not a good deal. And I think if the Russians presented it as such, it would rankle with him.

I mean, as we've been saying, you know, Putin's pretensions are in ruins. I don't know how the end will come, but it will one day. He's looking to me a lot like Tsar Nicholas II, who presided over the end of the Romanov Empire. He's got the same callousness towards his own people, the same arrogance, and ultimately,

The same stupidity, something has been revealed of this war is that his pretensions to be a great strategic thinker are ludicrous, really. He's made blunder after blunder, the biggest, of course, being the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And he's now too deep in to do it.

I mean, like Nicholas II, he's completely insulated from reality. This is what power, autocratic power, does to you. He's been in power, remember, for a quarter of a century. There's no one left in his circle, I think, who dares to acquaint him with reality.

So will he go in 2025? Well, I wouldn't bet against it. What about you, Saul? Well, I don't think Putin is going to be ousted anytime soon, Patrick. But, and here's the big but, if he badly misplays his hands over negotiations, that could lead to real trouble down the line. I mean, you've hinted at the possibility that the Americans may go all in on

on may go all in in economic sanctions, toughen the situation, make it much more difficult for an ailing Russian economy to operate. And that is, you know, that's there in the background. It's not just the use of force that the Americans can assist the Ukrainians with. It's really tightening up the whole sanctions regime, which is something that Trump's people have already suggested they might do if the deal is not there. So I'm

I don't think he's going to disappear anytime soon, but who knows if conditions get really tricky for him later in the year. Well, that's it from us for this year. Before we go, we'd just like to thank all our brilliant contributors. You've added so much to the podcast.

There are too many of them to mention all by name, but we'd like to thank particularly Asgol Kruschnitzky and Julia Strauss for their wonderful contributions from the field and Roger Morehouse for stepping in to co-host so effectively.

We'd also like to record our deep gratitude to someone whose voice you'll ever hear, but without whom this podcast would be very different. We may sound reasonably fluent and smooth in each episode, but that is in large part due to the brilliance of our producer, James Hodgson. James has only just turned 27, but he's already one of the best in the business. Thanks a million, James. And a huge thank you, too, to our loyal listeners.

You're a very impressive bunch. You're incisive, informed, and thought-provoking. And without your contributions, the pod would be a lot poorer. We've come to regard you as friends. Keep listening, and a very happy new year to you all.