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Hello and welcome to the Battleground Ukraine podcast with me, Roger Morehouse, filling in for Saul David and Patrick Bishop. Though the fighting on the ground has seemingly ground to something approximating to a stalemate, the war in Ukraine continues to dominate the headlines, increasingly as one of the many conflicts assailing the status quo. Nonetheless, today we'll look at some of the latest developments on the battlefield, as well as on the wider diplomatic front and elsewhere.
We'll also have another of our regular cyber updates from friend of the show, David Alexander, and we'll endeavour between us to answer some of your questions. First to developments on the ground this week, Patrick, two stories stood out for me. Firstly, the Ukrainian claimed to have downed two Russian jets over the Black Sea using missiles fired from naval drones, and supposedly this is a first in military history.
And the second one was the suggestion that Ukraine has carried out a successful pincer movement against Russian forces in what's left of Turetsk. Both relatively minor successes, of course, but nonetheless, I think, indicative of Kiev's unflagging resolve and its ability to adapt and continue to take the fight to its enemy. What was your take on those two? Well, first I want to say, Roger, thanks very much for standing in for me for today.
It was a month at least. Well, you've actually been nearer six weeks. You did a brilliant job. Thanks very much indeed. Good to be
in the chair with you today. Saul is off in Germany, we believe. I don't quite know. I think he's taking a battlefield tour or something. Anyway, so we seem to be a bit of a triumvirate now, long may that continue, long may the triumvirate reign. Well, Turetsky is one of those places being fought over for, you know, God knows how long the Russians spent thousands of lives taking it. Now it seems they're under pressure again.
As you say, this is an example of the resolve, the determination of the Ukrainians, even given the gloomy political and diplomatic background. It's very impressive, isn't it, that their heart is still in the fight. And then, of course, that story of the Russian jets being downed, again, another example of how Ukraine is just, you know, taking the lead all the time on the sort of technological front.
front. And I would have thought pretty dispiriting for the Russians, as we'll be hearing later. This is a kind of mood that's being echoed among some of the most vocal Russian journalists and mill bloggers as a kind of gloom is setting in. But things that struck me were also, you know, the incursion into the Kursk area, that's still going on. And also a very interesting story in the Times the other day about
the Russian fighting on the various points in the border with the oblast of Dnipropetrovsk, which is a very sizable area that covers all sorts of serious and important towns like Dnipro, Kliviy Lid, which of course is President Zelensky's home city. Well, very interesting report by Mark Bennett saying that, um,
He went out to the front and the Russians have been throwing men into these what are essentially pointless operations simply in order to be able to plant a foot inside the Dnipropetrovsk oblast. And this seems to be just a propaganda exercise, which will give President Putin on Victory Day, May the 9th, which is when this podcast is going out, something to crow over because he
This is really the kind of heartland of Ukraine. So it would represent an advance from Donbass area to,
into the Ukrainian heartland. Now, as the people that Bennett spoke to, the commanders, said, this is basically just a line on the map. It doesn't actually carry any strategic or indeed tactical significance at all. So it's basically offering the boss a kind of present on this great day celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War, which is something we're going to be talking about in some detail at various points.
So, yeah, all round, as you say, Roger, indication that the fight is still very much going on. And despite all the political setbacks,
The Ukrainian army stands firm. Yes. Again, to go back to those, that naval drone attack, which I think, I mean, it's significant in the sense, I mean, we've talked about this a lot and this seems to be increasingly the pattern. It's essentially asymmetric warfare we're talking about. You know, you've got a drone there, which is the cost of the drone apparently is about $300,000, it says, a bit less.
And they've got this, what they call a Franken-SAM project, which I thought was rather nice, where they're actually adapting these drones to then carry, you know, various other weapon systems, you know, of various sorts, whether even old Soviet stock and also Western Sidewinders and things like that. So you've got, you know, a total thing there, which is probably, I don't know, half a million dollars perhaps. And then you're downing a Sukhoi-30 fighter jet, which is $50 million at the least.
So, in that sense alone, the economic sense of it is a tremendous success. There's claim to have shot down two of them. Only one of the crews actually survived. So, it's a great example of that asymmetric warfare. And they're doing the same thing at Turetsk Front, as far as I was reading. You know, very careful and extremely tactical use of drones as well against terrorists.
against Russian positions. So effectively pinning the Russians down, not allowing them any sort of aerial support at all, but really using drones to a large extent rather than men. So I think it really shows you, as I said before, first of all, the ability of Ukrainian forces, remarkable ability of Ukrainian forces to adapt from what they've got into creating something novel and very effective.
And also, you know, it's a pointer for, I suppose, the future of warfare to a large extent. I mean, this is what we're seeing playing out on the ground. This is perhaps the pattern for conflict going into the 21st century. And we're seeing a fair amount of conflict at the moment. Yeah, and a pointer to the post-war Ukrainian economy is clearly going to be
a center for a modern arms industry, isn't it? And we'll come on to this a bit later about the American attitude, but one would have thought this is where you actually want to put your money if you're backing anyone. Why back a failing, decrepit 20th century power whose might depends entirely on the natural resources beneath its soil rather than an innovative industry?
tech-savvy, positive, Western-leaning, democratic-minded force like Ukraine. But that's one of the mysteries of the Trump mind and the Trump administration that we can go on about endlessly. And I referenced that the Victory Day celebrations. And of course, we've had that. It was announced a couple of weeks ago now, but this offer by Putin to suspend operations over the period, a three-day period. I
I think most people regarded that with some contempt. What about you, Roger? Is he significantly significant in that? Yeah, I mean, of course, he's wanting to not be embarrassed on his grand parade. He's got President Xi coming over and
and various other ne'er-do-wells, we can say, Maduro and Lukashenko and so on are also supposed to be turning up. I noticed also that Robert Fico's flight was prevented from entering Russian airspace by the Estonians, apparently, this morning, which Franco found a little bit amusing, but there we are. So, yeah, he's wanting to make sure that his grand parade for the 9th of May is not going to be interrupted by some Ukrainian drones, of course.
And you can understand that. I mean, this is a set piece. This is an absolute centerpiece of Russia's own sort of view of itself, of its own national mythology. They have, of course, as we know, they've sort of transferred the victory against the Nazis now becomes the original myth, if you like, that they're now sort of
of combating Nazism in inverted commas across the world. And of course, as they see it, its current hotbed is Ukraine for nonsensical reasons. So it's absolutely central to Putin's view of himself and Russia's view of itself that 9th of May goes ahead and all of those national myths are sort of reinforced.
I think from a Ukrainian perspective, Zelensky described the parade as a parade of cynicism, the 9th of May parade, which I think is a nice pithy conclusion on that. Yeah, sums up pretty well, doesn't it, Roger? The Russian version of the Great Patriotic War,
I've just been writing something about it for the Daily Mail. Yeah, I mean, there'll be no mention of the fact that for the first 22 months of the war, Hitler and Stalin were essentially allies.
That's nearly a third of the whole duration of the war. Of course, there'll be no mention of the behavior of the Red Army as they advanced into Germany. This is something you know a lot about. The orgy of rape and destruction. Maybe two million women were raped in Germany overall by the Red Army, 100,000 alone in Berlin. Often it was multiple rapes, gang rapes. Often the women were
Sometimes the women were killed. They were certainly all traumatized to some degree. There are all sorts of appalling statistics of those 100,000 women who were raped in Berlin. It's estimated that 10% of them, i.e. 10,000, committed suicide. Subsequently, so an appalling record, which of course has never been addressed by the Russian authorities, be they Soviet or be they post-Soviet. So there was a little brief moment, wasn't there, at the turn of the
when researchers, historians like Anthony Beaver managed to go into the files and all this evidence sort of comes from the reports of the NKVD or the bulk of it comes from the reports of the NKVD, the precursor of the KGB and the FSB. Even then, Patrick, I mean, even in the 90s, it was never uncontroversial.
in Russia that this was being talked about. I mean, Beaver, I think from memory, Beaver set off a diplomatic incident with his book Berlin because of its, you know, absolutely graphic descriptions and accounts of those rapes that you're talking about. So it was never uncontroversial, even if there was a brief moment where, you know, in theory at least, prepared to talk about it and prepared to open the archives. But they've long since backtracked on that. Yeah.
Yeah, there was a lot of pushback. And of course, it's now actually illegal to say anything along these lines. And in fact, Putin issued a warning just before last week, I think, saying anyone who tries to mess with our version of history, basically, is going to fail. This is the way it was. So we're probably putting ourselves on a list as we speak. But they really go to amazing lengths in this thing, apart from the usual stuff with the
in a gigantic missiles trundling across Red Square, goose-stepping special forces and all that sort of thing. They've actually done a reconstruction of the Bundestag building, which of course was the center, sorry, the Reichstag, which of course was the center point for the fighting. Once that had been captured, that was really symbolic, the end of
of the story. And of course, everyone remembers incredible pictures, I mean, brilliant pictures of the two Red Army guys raising the flag on a shattered ship.
remnants of the Reichstag. I must say, I found that I was actually in Berlin last weekend or weekend before and visited the Reichstag. I showed that very picture to some friends of mine. There's a funny story about that actually, Roger, which is that in the original picture, I mean, there's a lot of controversy about when the picture was actually taken because the Reichstag fell on April 30th.
And indeed, a flag was erected then, but then very rapidly shot down by the German arterial snipers, I think. And it was the picture we all remember is actually staged a couple of days later. I don't mind that. I don't have a problem with that. But in the original picture, one of the two guys has got a watch on each wrist. Now, this is evidence.
of the mass looting that went alongside the mass raping. So soldiers would go into, you know, it's the Hulh,
who were just wondering what's going to happen next. The first thing they would say, watch, give me your watch. Some guys were getting around with a whole armful of watches. But this was deemed to be bad propaganda. So in subsequent pictures, one of the wristwatches has been airbrushed out. Yeah, wonderful story, Patrick. But no, I found that, you know, that creation, recreation of the Reichstag build, I found absolutely grotesque, I must say. You know, I just found that that sort of takes that...
cult of commemoration. Well, we've got our own cult of commemoration. We saw that on last weekend, but I just found that absolutely grotesque. I was supposed to come back to Ukraine. The question now is,
You know, Putin essentially is not necessarily requested a ceasefire, but he's declared a ceasefire between the 8th and the 10th of May. And it's supposedly in place now. He said there was no negotiation with the Ukrainians over that, but he was hoping that they would follow his lead. But the question, I suppose, is whether the Ukrainians will. And they have spent most of the week negotiating.
sending drone attacks against Moscow airports. So they've shown that they're very much capable of disrupting things if they want to. I think this week all of Moscow's airports were closed. Something like 60,000 people were stranded in various departure gates and the rest of it.
So they've certainly shown they can do it and disrupt those celebrations. But the question is whether they choose to do so. So we'll see. The other angle for, you know, to bear in mind here in diplomatic terms is that from Putin's perspective, this is all part of the stringing Trump along. This is, you know, him asking for asking for that ceasefire.
gives him a little bit of gloss, potentially, in Trump's eyes. So he's sort of showing evidence that he's playing nice, which might string Trump along for another few weeks. So we'll see what effect that has. So it is significant. And as I said, in the short term, we'll see how Ukraine chooses to respond. Yeah, well, we'll find out pretty soon, won't we? Indeed. Let's move on to this. Talking about Russian attitudes, those deaths, pointless deaths that we've seen over and over again,
seem to be less relevant to Russian military morale than what we were talking about just now, which is the overmatch on the tactical front, but also on the technical front. Now, we know about this from a post by one of Russia's most prominent war reporters, a guy called Alexander Sledkov,
who has just published a brutally honest account or analysis on the state of Russia's campaign in Ukraine. And it's being taken seriously because it really does go against the whole propaganda line. Some of the remarks he makes were being beaten. I feel very sorry for us. The Navy doesn't even know where to hide. We're being hit by boats, drones, UAVs, even from space.
There's tactical paralysis, strategic dead ends are being pursued. He goes on in this vein. And he also speaks out against the way that anyone who criticizes the way the war is being conducted is just going to be in a face of all sorts of danger.
from the Kremlin and the FSB. So this is being spoken of as perhaps some kind of indication of collapsing Russian morale. What do you make of it? Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting. I mean, he's not insignificant as a voice, Sladkov.
You know, he's ex-military, he's a decorated, a very prominent war reporter, and that he's saying this. Admittedly, he's saying it in a private capacity on his Telegram channel. And there was some, you know, almost a disclaimer saying, you know, what do I know? This is all just nonsense. But still be surprised if he doesn't get at least a rap across the knuckles for this. It is quite remarkable. He does stop short of directly criticizing the leadership, obviously, but
But I think if you wanted to read that into it by implication, you could certainly do so. It talks about the failing military industrial base, lack of sort of tactical nous and all the rest of it you just mentioned. So this is a really thoroughgoing and I think damning indictment of the Russian military machine and by extension of Putin's regime. So-
Really, I think this is potentially very significant. And it'd be interesting to look at what happens to him in the next coming weeks as to whether there'll be any pushback, if he's at very least sort of forced to recant in some way. So maybe we can collectively try and keep an eye on Alexander Sladkov and see what happens. But yeah, it's tempting to believe that at
that is evidence and as we said before it's the asymmetric warfare that's doing it it's the nimbleness with which the Ukrainians are able to make war contrasted with this rather lumbering Russian force now historically lumbering Russian forces have been quite successful or could have been quite successful in a number of examples but we'll see whether this faltering morale if that's what it is has any sort of political ramifications Yeah quite interesting what he didn't say isn't it Roger because
Well, first of all, one thing I noticed was his self-pitying tone, which is quite characteristically Russian, you might say. Yeah, very Russian. But also, he doesn't go on about the...
The loss, the human losses, you know, one would have thought the starting point would be we've thrown away, you know, hundreds of thousands of lives in a very kind of ham fist, even if you believe in the war, even as he does. You would have thought that there'd be a brief mention of the squandering of lives, which has been, we've seen it from the very beginning, haven't we? And there seems no sign of it letting up now. So that was interesting in itself. Even on that, Patrick, I think we have to again understand that
the sort of Russian way of war and by extension of that, the Soviet way of war. It was always, you know, always contemptuous of the manpower. You know, it was never about the individual. It's about the end result. And again, in Berlin the other week, and we went to the Treptow Park, which is one of the largest Soviet cemetery, Red Army Cemetery in Berlin. So something like 80,000 Red Army soldiers are estimated to have died in the battle for Berlin itself.
And I think from memory, something like 8,000 of those are in Treptow Park, but they're all in mass graves. I mean, none of them are individual graves. And the people I was with were shocked by that. And I said, but that's just, that's the way the Soviet army, the Red Army used to work. And that's very much that tradition runs through the Russian army. It's, you know, to a large extent, it's about the collective, it's contempt for the individual. So the individual doesn't matter. And so, you know, you can take that, just take that logic to its nth degree. And that's where you get people
opinions like that. And like you said, that there's apparently no concern for the lives lost. Yeah, we know how to die. This was a Russian boast, isn't it, which has been repeated quite a lot, actually, by Kremlin propaganda during this current conflict. Well, let's switch to the diplomatic front now, Roger. Of course, attention has been shifting away, hasn't it, from Ukraine with what's going on between India and Pakistan, India's
than the US and Israeli and indeed UK attacks on the Houthis in Yemen. I think my view is that, you know, yeah, Trump has certainly got a lot on his plate on the diplomatic side of things. But because of all his boasts about getting Ukraine done, if you like, he can't really afford the time to spend too much time
on peacemaking efforts in Ukraine and Pakistan. All of that's been done in the past in Trump 1. And, well, the Israelis do their own thing anyway, don't they really? So I think the focus is still going to be, at least for a little while longer, where U.S. diplomatic efforts aim
Yeah, and it's interesting that they, you know, in spite of the sort of threats to walk away and sort of leave Russia and Ukraine to their own devices, which we saw again last week, there has been a sort of a slight shift, which we might see in retrospect, you know, much more clearly, but you obviously got the minerals deal from last week.
Again, the significance of that, we have to wait and see. But it looks like it's a sort of, to some degree, a sort of tentative alignment between Washington and Kiev. Or is it, you know, just Trump's
you know, exploitation. It's just a raw sort of capitalism, we'll see. But then again, you've got Vance, I think, you know, in the last couple of days in an interview was talking about the fact that Russia was asking too much and that Russia has to give something in its negotiating tactics. But again, that's very much the Russian method of negotiation is to ask for 110% in the hope that you might get 90%.
So that's, you know, anyone with any knowledge of, you know, how Russia or its Soviet predecessor has, you know, conducted negotiations down the years would know that that was the case. So, you know, one would hope that Mr. Vance is aware of all of this.
But nonetheless, a sort of potentially an interesting shift that, you know, prior to that, it was always Ukraine that came in for criticism from the White House, from the Trump White House anyway. And Russia seemed to get off scot-free, but they are at least now sort of turning their gaze a little more critically on the Kremlin. So that...
could potentially be a shift, Patrick, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, as you say, Roger, it's sensible not to pronounce these changes too early because the whole nature of diplomacy as conducted by the Trump White House is to sort of tag from one side to the other without any discernible pattern. But as you say, there's a general softening of the tone
I mean, the special US special envoy to Ukraine, General Keith Kellogg, has been making noises which really line the US with Ukraine in terms of seeing where the foot dragging is coming from. And he's saying that it's really them overhauling things up, not the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians have done everything that the US has asked of them. And this, of course, Kellogg has been
slightly, more than slightly, he's sort of been on the edge of the diplomatic picture where even though he was at the beginning, was meant to be the main man. So I think Vance's statement is perhaps more significant of the two, but at least they're both saying,
the same things. Yeah, of course, a Trump, you know, late night tweet or a post on whatever it is, truth social, you know, could still knock all of that, you know, potential positivity into a cocked hat. So, you know, we do have to wait and see very much. What's interesting and go back to the point we made right at the beginning is that Ukrainians in all of this have been saying, well, we'll fight on whatever. And they've shown, as I've said, whether they've shown this week, they're very much capable of doing so.
So, you know, that's also significant in this. So it just remains to be seen how long U.S. patience and gullibility with regard to, you know, the Kremlin's obfuscations and hesitations on this, how long that gullibility will last, which we'll see. Yeah. And on the Ukrainian front, of course, you know, their ability to stay in the fight depends, of course, on
especially now that American support is by now guaranteed and in fact a sensible strategy review to just assume that at some point it's going to be pulled. Now, it depends on you, the European ability to fill the gap, step into the breach, use whatever cliche you like. And that also depends on
Very large on Germany. So tell me, as a German expert, Roger, what you make of this Friedrich Merz debacle? Is that too strong a word for the way that he appeared to have it in the bag, the chancellorship, and then suddenly it slipped through his fingers? Yeah. Well, the problem is, I suppose, that the German political establishment...
so desperate to, in a sense, carry on business as usual whilst excluding the AFD. The AFD obviously had a great success in the recent election. So he's trying to sort of cobble together a coalition to make sure that the AFD are excluded. And in the process is, you know, falling foul of various demands, particularly from the left, from the SPD, which
which they want to sort of maintain immigration to a large extent, which of course he was part of the, you know, one of the absolutely red hot button issues of the election was immigration. One of an issue on which the AFD always scores very highly. So he was needing to tack to some extent in their direction to sort of gain votes from that, from the center, right.
And the SPD are pulling him back to a position that he's not happy with. And then in the vote this week as to his appointment, you know, he was humiliated. So it points to either, I would suggest, an absolute paralysis in German politics going forward, which is not helpful for anybody, but certainly not helpful for Ukraine.
Or it points to some sort of tactical arrangement, if it's at all possible and politically palatable.
between the CDU and the AFD to, you know, enable politics to work. And, you know, that's a very uncomfortable position. And it's one, as I say, that, you know, the German political elite and political establishment will howl about if that's the direction he chooses to go down. But, you know, if you're left with politics effectively, you know, hamstrung,
then what does he do? Call another election? That will only benefit the AFD, surely. So extremely difficult situation in Germany. And as we say, the knock-on effect of that, of all that
political paralysis can only be detrimental to Ukraine's fortunes. So, yeah, again, I see it as the long hangover of the Merkel years, in effect. This is immigration coming back to bite the German political elite and causing that political paralysis. So,
So, yeah, difficult times in Berlin. We'll see what comes out of that one. Yeah, which, as you say, not welcome at all. We were looking for strong leadership from Merz, not just of Germany, but of Europe generally. I think that's what Macron was hoping for as well. And now we see a very kind of unclear, cloudy picture ahead coming at the worst possible time. On the other hand, I don't know if you saw that Joe Biden interview. He's emerged to give his first speech.
proper TV interview with the BBC with Nick Robinson. And it was a kind of satisfactory reminder of just how flaky his presidency was, I think. I mean, he's had a lot of time to reflect. He's had a lot of time to recoup his strength and recharge his batteries. His performance was phenomenal.
Pretty unimpressive, wasn't it? I mean, even what he was saying was it didn't seem to make a great deal out of it.
sense a lot of the time. He was very defensive about his presidency, as you would expect, I suppose, particularly his decision to linger on and not allow, in most people's view, not allow enough time for a proper democratic challenger to Trump to emerge. Very defensive about all that. But a lot of it was just sort of boilerplate stuff. You know, he was saying ceding any Ukrainian territory amounts to modern day appeasement. He said, you know,
He was worried about what was going on in Ukraine as being the biggest threat to democracy since the Second World War.
You know, rightly critical of what that terror is, those awful scenes in the White House back in February. And he was saying this is beneath America, what took place, you know, what kind of president ever talks like that? That's not who we are, i.e. who America has. A lot of people would second those emotions. But he was never pinned down by Robinson on what happened.
actually he was trying to do in Ukraine, why he didn't give them everything they asked for, why was he so nervous about the, as you say, very predictable Kremlin saber-rafting, just the sort of thing you'd expect from the Russians, the sort of thing they've been doing
essentially. So his feet were definitely not held to fire on that one. Yeah, I agree. I mean, it is a sort of salutary reminder for all the horrors of the current Trump administration. But, you know, Biden really wasn't a sort of viable alternative. And I've got to say, I don't think Kamala Harris was either, but
And as you say, there's a lot of platitudes with which everyone can nod along and say, yeah, absolutely right. But, you know, he didn't actually handle the situation in accordance with those principles that he sort of claims to uphold, you know.
As you say, I mean, why did he not, you know, go harder and faster in the supply of weaponry to Ukraine? And of course, we know it's that, you know, fear of escalation. But that's something the Russians are very adept at exploiting at every turn and have been. So, yeah, it felt more like a sort of, you know, yet another exercise in,
in Trump bashing rather than any sort of answering for his own potential failings. But yeah, interesting to get at least that perspective for anyone that's nostalgic about the Biden years. It was a useful corrective, I think. Okay, that's it for this half. Do join us in part two when we're getting that cyber update from our friend David Alexander, which we promised earlier, and of course, answering all your questions.
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Welcome back. We have our usual cyber update from David Alexander, who's our tame cyber security expert. And a few points from his report, which jumped out at me, Patrick. And the first one was that there seems to have been a failed Russian cyber attack on the Romanian election, which was last weekend. Several pro-Kremlin hacking groups attacked.
have claimed to have launched a DDoS attack. So this is effectively sort of internet jamming on Romanian government websites on the day of the election. Interestingly, they seem to have failed in that because none of the websites were actually taken down. And some of those agencies that were reported to have been attacked have
said that they saw no evidence that those attacks had actually taken place. So either the hackers are sort of failing in their task or perhaps Romania's cyber security has been upgraded. Of course, this is Romania's election at the end of last year was annulled, if you remember, because of the rather unprecedented success of what was seen as a pro-Russian candidate. And it was the suspicion of the Russian interference in that whole process that led to the annulment so controversially.
So it's interesting that they tried it again, but perhaps more interestingly, that they seem to have failed. And at the same time, you have an attack on nearby Moldova, a cyber attack on nearby Moldova by Russian disinformation, a group called Matryoshka, which has been targeting Moldova's pro-EU political scene for several months.
David tells us that they publish fake news stories that are meant to discredit and spread lies about the Moldovan pro-EU President Maya Sandu and other pro-EU elements within the government. So clearly this is, you know, as we know, the next front or the current front in the
the war ongoing. And it's very much a sort of central plank of Russia's hybrid warfare. And we've seen that going right back to, you know, 2007 with the attack on Estonia. They did the same thing in Georgia in 2008. So this is very much, you know, the modern way of war, interestingly. Now, UK listeners will be very familiar with a story of how hackers have got into the systems of big
UK retailers such as Marks and Spencers, M&S, the Co-op, and Harrods, forcing particularly Marks and Spencers operations into basically closing down on the online services anyway for a couple of days. And of course, there was speculation that the Russians might be behind this. Now, the attacks have been attributed to a group called Dragon Force,
And David says that even though the speculation was rife, there's nothing that he can see that links Dragon Force to Moscow or the Kremlin. And he says that it's widely believed to be a pro-Palestinian team based in Malaysia. So we can't actually pin that one on Vladimir Putin.
Well, many thanks to David once again for filling us in on this absolutely vital, as you say, Roger, aspect of contemporary war crime, particularly the war in Ukraine. So we're going to move on to our questions now.
And I just want to say at the beginning, I've had lots of messages from people saying, you know, expressing concern and offering support for my absence. You know, I was away for six weeks with health issues, which are now, as I say, I'm back to normal, pretty much barring on all cylinders. So it's very nice to get those. Thanks very much indeed for your thoughts. Well, I just want to deal with this.
First one, if you don't mind, Roger, which is from Nick. And Nick's been in touch with us frequently in the past. And he was referring to the interview we had last week with Edward Lucas, the security expert, Times columnist, etc. Nick says, I see he's a former senior editor at The Economist magazine. And Nick used to work for The Economist.
and has an economics degree from Cambridge University. Now, he takes issue with the fact that Edward said that Russia's economy was about the same size as Italy's. Now, this is something that people do say from time to time. And Nick very much wants to put this into context and say, look, you know, this...
It's not really like that. And in fact, there are all sorts of ways of measuring the size and power of an economy. And one way of doing it is by the purchasing power parity measure. By that, he says, Russia's economy is the fourth largest in the world behind China and the US and India, but ahead of Germany and Japan. So he slightly takes us to task with that. So we're correcting it.
Here again, I think we've done it before in the past, but he also says, I think I piped up and said, well, you know, I made some mention of the fact that the Russian economy was on the point of collapse, again, something we've said frequently. And he says, well, no, can you stop saying that? Because it is... The answer is we don't know. It's certainly true that all those Cassandra-like predictions are...
Indeed. A cold shower of realism there. Always welcome.
So Tom from Ontario has come back, sent a message again. Ed Luke has briefly mentioned that Ukraine's need for rocket engines and implied that Ukraine's raining down bombs on Russian cities could be a game changer. Could you go a little deeper on this? I get why Ukraine can't use British American weapons, but if they can make their own, and what about it? I mean, we're seeing that.
um that's that's been one as i said before you know one of those sort of interesting developments in this war is ukraine's ability to adapt what it already has so it's not necessarily using you know those you know the scalp missiles or whatever it might be although to some extent they can but they're always those always come with sort of strings and implications and
And risks that whether it be the British or the French or whoever, you know, don't necessarily want to invoke. So I think of necessity, Ukraine has been very adept at developing its own longer range, you know, capacity in this respect.
And we've seen it. I mean, we've seen Ukraine, you know, bombing the Russian sort of energy infrastructure, you know, pipelines and refineries and so on. And then this very week, you know, they've been hitting Moscow's airports, which is, you know, a tremendous distance from Ukraine. So they've shown they've got that capability and that shift to domestic production and to this, as we said before, this sort of Frankenstein production of actually sort of cobbling together things
with conventional and other supplied weapons being carried upon them. They're already doing that, and I think to great effect. So I think that's a really significant part of the narrative. So in that sense, I think, yeah, Tom's absolutely right. Yeah, Tom also makes a point about the morality of technology
of targeting Russian cities. Now, this has been a kind of feature of the war, isn't it, with Ukraine taking the moral high ground. That's been their kind of stated position. They're not going to seek to do to Russia what Russia has done to them, really. And Tom is asking whether that is going to change if they get this ability to send troops
weapons long distances and effectively target Russian cities far from the front lines. He says now, given the changing situation, why would they hesitate any further? Well, my view is it wouldn't actually be a good idea for all sorts of reasons. First of all,
this sort of thing doesn't win wars hitting an apartment block is not going to change the military situation it's a waste of resources and it's probably going to actually just feed the
a Moscow narrative that they're up against a bunch of Nazis. They're up against terrorists, yeah. Yeah, exactly, yeah. No, I absolutely agree. I think that sort of moral aspect is one of, potentially one of Ukraine's trump cards in effect. So, you know, if it can, if it has that capacity, which it's shown it has, to bomb infrastructure and particularly, as we saw last year, particularly with, you know, that targeting of
energy infrastructure in Russia, which I think was hugely effective, that would seem to be the way forward. So yeah, I agree. I don't think they should go down that road. I think it would be entirely counterproductive. Ben has written in to say, will there be a Ukrainian Victory Day parade, given that Ukrainian troops fought and died for the Soviets against the Nazis?
I imagine whether there is or isn't would be an interesting reflection on Ukrainian society's attitude towards World War II. What's your take on that, Patrick? Well, there will be a victory parade today as we speak, I think, but it's not a celebration of the Great Patriotic War itself.
Europe celebrates, excluding Russia, celebrates Victory in Europe Day today on the 8th of May, whereas Russia, for reasons that Saul explained eloquently last week,
It doesn't until the following day, the 9th. That's because the Russians or the Red Army didn't accept the document signed on the 7th of May by Eisenhower in Reims, Germany.
And they insisted that it was signed again in Berlin. And various time shifts and time zone changes in the West River. That was actually on the night. So that's the end of that complicated footnote. Anyway, Ukraine cancelled those Victory Day Great Patriotic War celebrations in 2013. Indeed, the term Great Patriotic War is now banned from official publications everywhere.
in Ukraine, and it's called the Second World War like everyone else in Europe does. I think these are very significant, these things, aren't they, Roger? I mean, these kind of society where words don't matter that as much as they do in places like Ukraine, where language is very, very sensitive. These are important things. Historical context is almost a kind of weather vane of which direction you're pointing in. So a lot of the former Soviet republics like Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan,
they still celebrate Victory Day on the 9th. But places that were previously in the Soviet orbit, behind the Iron Curtain, if you like, like Poland and Bulgaria, they don't, or they celebrate it in their own way, distinct to very distinct and that miseric kitsch that we see in Red Square every May the 9th. Yeah, and it's interesting, I think, because...
modern russia and particularly under putin has sort of appropriated wholesale the the sort of soviet mythology of the war if you like you know you get to a weird situation where they they tend to claim you know all of the soviet dead which is a hugely debatable figure anyway but it's generally reckoned around sort of 25 million or whatever it is i mean it's vast but
from World War II. So you get the situation where the Russians increasingly kind of appropriate all of those dead as their own, as part of their own sort of mythology and narrative of the Great Patriotic War, and then even get that amplified and exaggerated by people like Trump. And I can't remember what figure Trump dreamt up the last time he mentioned this, but it was way in excess of 25 million dead.
And we forget in the process that actually 9 million of that 25 plus, whatever it was, dead from the Second World War were Ukrainians. So Ukraine has absolutely every right to commemorate those dead and that victory in its own right, as a modern independent sovereign state. So I think we should collectively resist that.
that rather lazy appropriation of the entire war debt of the Soviet Union by Russia, because it's another piece of sleight of hand by the Kremlin. So we should remember those 9 million as well, the 9 million Ukrainians. That's an incredibly important point, Roger, because you're absolutely right. The Ukrainians were the second most numerous ethnic group in the Red Army after the Russians.
And so, you know, by quite a big margin. So, of course, all the other republics contributed troops, but it was very much a sort of Russo-Ukrainian effort in terms of manpower. And to just to now claim that these people...
You were fighting combat shoulder to shoulder during the so-called Great Patriotic War, and now I've been somehow transmogrified into Nazis. It's an incredible historical lie, isn't it? Let's call it what it is. Indeed. On that front, actually, there's an interesting question here, or rather observation from Ray in Eastbourne.
He says, I'm a regular listener. Would you please give a mention to the, quote, victims of Yalta, unquote, the thousands of Ukrainian Cossacks and white Russians, including their wives and children, who after their surrender in Austria,
in May, June 1945, but forcibly handed over by the British army to the Soviets. Now this was, he goes on, most of them were tortured and executed, many committed suicide, many disappeared into the gulag. Were these memories and that of the Holodomor, i.e. the great forced famine carried out by the Soviets, is it no surprise that the Ukrainians today resist the Kremlin's
domination, the murder, tortures, rapes, etc. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there was a big controversy about this. It was a bit of a sort of state secret for a long time. This is the Aldington case, I think it was called. It went through the British courts a few years ago. Yeah, it was a kind of basically Nikolai Tolstoy's book, I think, called Victims of Yalta, which laid bare just how complicit
The British Army was in handing these people back, some of whom, you know, as he says, committed suicide rather than knowing what their fate would be. I think it's a complicated story. You know, what were we going to do? They were in our control, in British Army controlled territory.
to have refused to hand them over would have caused enormous problems. I think looking back, we probably should have shown more backbone, but the fact was they were our allies. The war was over admittedly, but lots of, yeah, I mean, you know, it's, it's a controversial subject, which I, it makes you feel very uncomfortable, but you know,
Practically speaking, there were probably unsustainable reasons why British officials were reluctant to kill it, to stand off with the Soviets and the Red Army over it.
Didn't want to go back because many of them have been fighting alongside the Germans for various reasons and didn't want to go back to the Soviet Union, understandably. But the problem then is that if you acquiesce to those requests, then it sets a dangerous precedent for all of those large numbers of British and American POWs.
from the German POW network in the east, in sort of occupied Poland and the eastern provinces of Germany, that were now in Soviet hands. So what would the Soviets then do with them? Would that set a precedent where they'd say, well, you can't have your POWs back? So I think that was the sort of the practical bind that the Allies were in in 1945. Of course, the bottom line of this is that the Soviet Union
at the end of that war was unbelievably brutal in its treatment of any of those of its citizens, not necessarily who had collaborated, but even people who had disappeared into the concentration camp system, who had been captured and used as POWs, forced laborers even for the Germans. For them, liberation initially obviously was a joyous occasion.
But it very quickly went very sour because, you know, the Soviet regime essentially treated them like traitors, as it did with these cases that Ray's mentioning. So it's unbelievably brutal treatment that was meted out to these people and very often for no fault of their own. I'm not, I wouldn't, you know, condone their collaboration with the Germans in this case of the Ukrainian Cossacks and others. This is the background to it, the incredibly brutal treatment.
Yeah, one of the appalling aspects of the Red Army's rape campaign, if you want to call it that, was that they also raped Soviet women who had been carted off to Germany in forced labor.
to work as slave laborers. And, of course, when the Red Army arrived, their hopes rose to the end of their ordeal, only to find that they were on the receiving end of these terrible sexual attacks by their so-called liberators. On the question of those prisoners of war, I mean, there was a blanket state policy of treating them
not just as second-class citizens, but as you say, Roger, as cowards or traitors. And so they were denied the same benefits and status as other war veterans. That means no pensions, no other privileges. Some of them were even sent to labor camps, you know, way out in Siberia, where they ended their days. I mean, you know.
It really is. It defies imagination sometimes.
Anyway, he goes on to say, on April 24th, the ISW, Institute for the Study of War, reported a Russian military court sentenced the former 58th Combined Arms Army Commander Major General Ivan Popov to imprisonment.
likely as part of an ongoing Kremlin effort to punish Russian military commanders who weaponize the information space to advance their political goals that undermine Putin's power vertical. Interesting point. He says, what could this sort of internal discontent between the military and Putin produce?
Could it help drive the Russians towards concessions, perhaps some sort of advantage that could help Ukraine? Now, that's an interesting question, an interesting issue as well. How widespread is discontent in Russian armed forces? And tying in with what we said earlier on about the military correspondence, Mr. Sladkov,
You know, how widespread is that realization that this is not going as, certainly not going as well as was predicted? It's not the three-day campaign that Putin wanted. At what point does that legitimate criticism of the operation spread into a wider criticism of the regime? We won't know until it happens, I think is my guess. No, exactly. But it's interesting that clearly that discontent is sort of bubbling, at least in isolated places.
Popov is an interesting character. He's basically been sentenced under charges of corruption, which most people don't believe. They think his real crime was to actually speak up. He didn't speak out. It was a private conversation that was recorded and then
put into the public domain when he was voicing kind of pretty obvious criticisms of the way that the war was being conducted. It goes back to my point about, you know, what happens now with Sladkov. You know, it'd be interesting to see whether there's any comeback for him for being critical of the performance of the Russian army. Yeah, well, he would have known the pop-off story, so he may have been making a calculated guess of his worth.
speaking out. So yeah, watch this space. Okay, that's it for us for this week. You join us for another episode on Wednesday of Battleground 45. Oh, and join us on Monday when we'll have a full interview with someone you'll remember, our old friend Colonel Pavlo Hazan of the Ukrainian Army. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.