Dan Snow's History Hit - Russia & Ukraine: A Year of War

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

On the 24th of February, 2022, the world looked on in disbelief as Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. One year on he shows no signs of easing his commitment to the conflict, despite the many setbacks that Russian forces have faced. The question is, why hasn't Russia's invasion gone to plan? Where did they get it wrong, where have the Ukrainians got it right, and how can we make sense of the conflict as it stands today? To answer these questions, we are joined by conflict scholar Mike Martin, who explains Russia's issues by looking at how wars have been waged in the past. We are also joined by the Ukrainian medical student and refugee, Margo Bendeliani, who gives us the perspective of someone who lives this war every day and reminds us of the conflict's human cost.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

One year ago today, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of her independent, democratic neighbor, Ukraine. Although this felt like the beginning of a new conflict, in fact, the Russo-Ukrainian war had been rumbling along since early 2014, when Russia had forcibly annexed the Crimean Peninsula and supported established Russian-backed separatist republics in the eastern Donbass region, which led to violence and the displacement of thousands of people. Despite this fairly low-intensity warfare in eastern Ukraine. As 2021 drew to a close, we all found it hard to believe the reports that were coming through of Russian soldiers massing along Ukraine's borders,

preparing for what Vladimir Putin has subsequently described, ambiguously, as a special military operation. I remember February 23-22 so clearly, that feeling we all had, wondering if Putin was crazy enough to invade. I was on a ship in the Antarctic, sucking every little ounce of internet I could get to keep abreast of the story. It seemed like an act of colossal folly, one that could bring World War III closer. And many of us couldn't bring ourselves to believe that Putin would take that kind of a gamble. But we were wrong. On February 24th, 2022, the world tuned in in disbelief to the news. This is BBC News. I'm Lise Doucette live in Kiev.

These are the headlines now in the UK and around the world. Russia has invaded Ukraine. This is the warning of President Putin to the world. Whoever tries to interfere with us or threaten our country should know that Russia's response will be immediate and lead to such consequences that have never been experienced in history. Russian troops stationed at several points along the borders streamed into Ukraine. Paratroopers launched an offensive against a key airport just outside Kiev. The aim seemed to be to cut off the capital, seize it quickly, and assassinate President Zelensky. Putin assumed it would be a quick offensive, and he certainly did not anticipate the resolve with

which Ukraine would respond and defend itself. Within hours, it was clear that for the first time since the Second World War, a full-scale conventional conflict had gripped the European continent. As the conflict unfolded over the last 12 months, Dan Snow's history has followed, trying to make sense of why it's all happening, how we got here, some deep dives into Ukrainian and Russian history, and providing a bit of historical context behind the headlines. So in this one-year anniversary episode, we're going to hear from past guests. We're going to hear from medieval historian Matt Lewis and the anthropologist Dr. Tatyana Vagrimenko, who shed light on the origins of the conflict.

We're going to get a present-day analysis from Mike Martin, he's a conflict scholar, he's an ex-serviceman, and he told me about how governments, organisations, have tried to fight in the past and why they failed. We're also importantly going to hear from Margot Bendeliani. She's a medical student who fled from Ukraine's eastern Donbass, who reminds us that the heart of all this story are countless people suffering, dying, missing, displaced in an appalling, unnecessary, callous war of aggression. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king.

No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. The Russo-Ukrainian war that we're seeing playing out now began in 2014, but its roots obviously run much deeper. On the day of the announcement of Russia's invasion, I was in Antarctica, out of the way, so Matt Lewis, host of our sister podcast Gone Medieval, stepped in to give a brief history of the tangled concepts of Russian and Ukrainian

national identity, which has been a defining aspect of the current conflict. Ukraine was known as the breadbasket of Soviet Russia. It remains politically, militarily and economically important to Russia today. Precisely why there is a dispute over the sovereignty, or otherwise, of Ukraine is a complex question rooted in the region's history. It's a story more than a thousand years in the making. For much of that time, Ukraine did not exist, at least not as an independent sovereign state, so the name Ukraine will be used to help identify the region around Kiev that was so central to the story. Crimea is an important part of the story too, and its history forms a part of the history of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine.

Today, Kiev is the capital city of Ukraine. A millennium ago, it was the heart of what is known as the Kievan Rus state. Between the 8th and 11th centuries, Norse traders sailed the river routes from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Predominantly Swedish in origin, they found their way to the Byzantine Empire and even attacked Persia from the Caspian Sea in the 10th century. Around what is now Kiev, these traders began to settle. They were referred to as the Rus, which seems to have its origins in the word for men who row, since they were so closely associated with the rivers and their ships. Merging with Slavic, Baltic and Finnic tribes, they became known as the Kievan Rus. The Rus tribes are the ancestors of those who still bear their name today,

the Russian and Belarusian people, as well as those of Ukraine. Kiev was referred to by the 12th century as the mother of Rus cities, effectively denoting it as the capital of the Kievan Rus state. The rulers of the region were styled Grand Princes of Kiev. The association of Kiev with the early heritage of the Rus as the root of the Russian people mean the city has a hold over the collective imaginations of those beyond modern Ukraine. It was important to the birth of Russia but now lies beyond its borders. This thousand-year-old connection is the beginning of an explanation of the present tensions. People are always willing to fight over places that exert a pull on them.

During the 19th century, a Ukrainian identity began to emerge more fully. By this stage, Russians, considered Ukrainians and Belarusians as really ethnically Russian, but did refer to them as Little Russians. In 1804, the growing separatist movement in Ukraine saw the Ukrainian language banned in schools as a way to neutralize one threat to the integrity of the Russian Empire. A century later, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, Ukraine was briefly an independent nation, but not for long.

It would soon become part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, which would be a dominant force in world politics for most of the rest of the 20th century. Under Soviet rule, any Ukrainian deemed to be asserting or maintaining an identity other than that of a devout communist worked into the dissidence and with the mercy of the notorious secret police, the KGB. Thousands of ethnic minorities and religious minorities, intellectuals were interrogated, they were tortured, imprisoned, disappeared, killed. These were crimes that until recently were locked away in deep archives. We spoke to the social anthropologist Tatyana Vagrimenko in mid-March last year as she was trying to get her family out of Ukraine. She told us about her recent research into the KGB archives in Kiev that were declassified in 2014 after the Maidan Revolution

as Ukraine tried to untangle itself further from its Soviet and Russian past. She said they shed light on what Ukraine had endured under Russia's iron fist, but also why the history they've revealed are central to understanding and countering Putin's rhetoric during the war today. Putin began his invasion with a surprisingly long and extended history lecture. He justified why he began this war. And there was lots of references to the Soviet era, when Ukraine was one of the republics of the Soviet Union. So he's kind of justifying his invasion. And he's questioning the Ukrainian statehood, saying that it's just a mere mistake of the Soviet project. The last decade, what he did, he glorified the Soviet Union, the history of the Soviet Union.

He was a KGB officer. He's the former KGB officer himself. That's his training and that will stay for life in his mind. And what he did, he basically started to closing all kind of archives that related to, that could hide some historical material about the Soviet period. He repressed many people and many organizations that did research the history of the Soviet Union. That was his consistent preparation, I think, what he wants to restore the Soviet Union. He wants this empire back. And of course, what happened in Ukraine is completely the opposite.

It must be very irritating for him because, OK, so we have 1991, the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Ukraine, for many years since after that, being an independent state, was under shadow of Russia, of Kremlin, until it was not. And since 2004, there was a move of Ukrainian government, of social movement, people's movement, away from Russia, away from this Soviet legacy closer to Europe. In 2014, there was a Maidan revolution. Many of us read and heard about that, that that was the beginning of the actual war. And that was the year, the following year after the Maidan, when Ukraine adopted the so-called decommunization laws. They also refer to as memory laws.

And that was a clear departure from the Soviet legacy. The laws were saying that any kind of symbol of the Soviet history, like statues of Lenin you could find everywhere, or flags of the Soviet Union, should be dismantled. And one of the laws was about the opening of the KGB archives and any other Soviet archives. And all the materials, the research is coming from Russia, from Ukraine, from all over the world.

They were coming to the archives and they were rediscovering or just discovering the history of Soviet oppression because the KGB archive is the biggest database of Soviet crimes. And I'm sure that was very irritating for Putin, something that he would love to destroy, he would love to close forever. I've talked to so many historians over the years on this podcast, but few of them, it seems, have got such an important role to play in current events. What do you think people can learn from your research? How should it be shared and what impact can it have? I want us to see history not as something like a reified fetish and something boring that we are tired of reading at school.

I want us to revise history as something as part of our life, of our everyday life, and to look at history through people's life, through normal people's lives, through their tragedies, through their love, through their death, when we will humanize our vision of history, when we see it not as the political party made this move or big politician delivered that speech that brought to war. No, history is actually us or my grandmother or my great-grandmother who lived through the Great Terror, who lived through war. And I want to see history like this through the people's life. And you know what? I believe that type of history, that vision of history will never lie to us. It will be honest

and it will help us understand what's going on right now. And so with Tatiana's words in mind, here's a recap of the key events that we've seen unfold over the past 12 months since Putin's invasion. After the Russian troops stationed on the border poured into Ukraine, the suburbs of Irpin and Bukha around Kiev were seed, but strong Ukrainian resistance and logistical issues in the Russian advance saw their forces bogged down within days. The challenges presented by this really ambitious large-scale invasion plan had been laid bare. Images of vast Russian supply convoys clogging up roads for miles began to circulate.

There were stories of Russian commanders dying on the front line as they were trying to desperately push forward to direct tank and infantry attacks themselves. From the Ukrainian perspective, the early weeks of the war were a time of responding frantically to it, of civilian panic, and to trying to build an international coalition. Millions of citizens fled into neighboring countries or were internally displaced. Many had no access to water, electricity, gas or food, and simply going to the shops in a city under siege like Kiev could mean death. Appeals were made to international allies to provide where they could, weaponry, food or medical supplies. By April, in a stunning reverse, Russian forces withdrew from the Kiev region and they refocused on eastern Ukraine, places that are now burned into our

collective memory. The siege of Mariupol, the Battle of Kharkiv in the first half of 2022 have become synonymous with steadfast Ukrainian resilience. Kharkiv was held. The city of Mariupol was eventually lost to the Russians, but the Ukrainian defenders inflicted a reputational disaster on Putin. The sinking of Russia's Black Sea Fleet flagship, the Moskva, was another huge loss for Russia, an embarrassment and a setback for Russian morale. By May, both sides appeared to reach something of a stalemate, with neither making significant advances in the south or the east. In the meantime, relentless rocket strikes, artillery barrages and air attacks continued

against military and civilian infrastructure across the country. The city of Severodonetsk was reduced to rubble after months of shelling, and by the end of June it had fallen into Russian hands. In the same month, Putin ordered a barbaric strike on a shopping mall in Kremenshchuk, with more than a thousand people inside. In September, things started to move. The Ukrainians advanced. Putin started to look a little panicky. He officially announced that virtually anyone in Russia could now be drafted into the military. The Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, said in early October that 200,000 reservists had already been mobilized. By now, the Russian forces were made up of professional soldiers, but also tens of thousands of reservists, conscripts, former prisoners, as well as thousands of mercenaries and paramilitary fighters through organizations

like the quasi-autonomous Wagner Group. In early October, the Ukrainians built on their success. They attacked the Crimean bridge that linked Crimea with Russia. In retribution, Putin launched an enormous campaign of rocket strikes across the entire country. Hundreds more civilians were killed or injured. But these were scare tactics, and they were proving less and less effective. Ukrainian morale was pretty high, they seemed pretty steadfast in their determination to win, and the city of Kursan, with its crucial bridge between the Crimea and the rest of Ukraine, had been captured by the Russians early in the conflict, but by November, the Russians had abandoned the city in the face of this strong Ukrainian counter-offensive.

The months since have seen continuing attacks on Ukraine's critical infrastructure, on its cities, and both sides are prepared for the fighting of 2023. Many nations have renewed their pledges of financial and military support for Ukraine, with the US notably providing their Patriot missile system, and other nations promising to supply main battle tanks, artillery pieces, and lots more ammunition. The Russo-Ukrainian War has been an unwelcome showcase of conventional interstate 21st century war. We've seen mass mobilizations of armor, aircraft, deployment of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and paramilitary personnel on both sides. Relatively new additions to the battlefield

like drones with offensive and surveillance capabilities, specialist tracking equipment and cutting-edge weaponry have been used to great effect. Social media, TikTok, Telegram and other online resources have been deployed to track enemy movements and wage the information war. Much of Ukraine's civilian population and infrastructure have been mobilized and redirected towards repelling the Russian invaders. Meanwhile, in Russia, hundreds of thousands of young Russians have been conscripted in the fight to, as they put it, liberate Ukraine. We've seen all the symptoms of conventional warfare. I certainly thought I'd never see again in my lifetime. Massive troop advances, artillery rocket strikes, naval blockades, alongside vigorous propaganda

campaigns. It's all been in the mix. Try and gain an upper hand in the fighting. All this has caused horrifying destruction for Ukraine. As a result, we've seen the largest European refugee crisis since the Second World War. Figures from early 2023 state that an estimated 8 million people have been displaced from their homes. The UN Human Rights Office estimates that over 7,000 civilians have been killed and 11,500 injured in the fighting, but notes that the true figure is likely to be a lot higher. The figures for military casualties are a closely guarded secret on both sides, but now seem to be over 100,000. With all that in mind, and with the help of Mike Martin, a conflict scholar, and Margot Bendliani,

a Ukrainian medical student in Britain, we're going to dig into some of the questions everyone's trying to answer. What does this tell us about Putin's regime? What's this meant for Ukraine and the rest of the world? Where will this story end? Mike, good to have you back on the podcast, buddy. Hey, Dan. Well, last time you came on the podcast, we were talking about insurgency, but you were particularly talking about why people fight, like in-out group loyalty. Did you think one day you would be explaining on international media

how actually a massive conventional war, tanks rumbling across Eastern Europe, did you ever believe that would happen? I mean, I thought there was going to be a war for sure. national media, how actually a massive conventional war, tanks rumbling across Eastern Europe. Did you ever believe that would happen? I mean, I thought there was going to be a war for sure. It seemed for maybe five or, yeah, at least five years that we're going to hit another global war. I hadn't expected it to be a tank war on the European continent. That certainly wasn't on my vision. Interesting. But you thought Russia and probably China, it's heading unpleasantly in one direction. Yeah. I mean, if you look generally at the world,

all sorts of things are out of control. The problems are getting bigger faster than we can cope with them. So climate change is an obvious one, and that causes lots of migration. So that hasn't even really started to hit us yet. There's inequality between different countries, the international system's breaking down, and it's failing to bring parties together. So I think there are a number of things that at a macro level globally were happening. And of course, they make all of these trigger points more likely to happen. So China, Taiwan's a trigger point, Russia, Turkey, India, Pakistan, the Sahel region. But I didn't think that, well, frankly, actually, Pakistan, the Sahel region. But I didn't think that, well, frankly, actually, I didn't think Russia would be so stupid to launch a war on the European continent, which inevitably would bring in NATO, which is the strongest, most successful military

alliance that's ever existed. But to the disbelief of many international observers, Putin did indeed invade. Margot Bendeliani is from eastern Ukraine, from the Donbass region, and she's actually been a refugee since Russia's initial annexation of Crimea and destabilisation of eastern Ukraine in 2014. Margot, thank you very much for coming on. Tell me, where are you at the moment? I'm in Katarin. It's in the Hamptonshire. How long have you you at the moment? I'm in Kettering. It's in the Hamptonshire. How long have you been in the UK? I have been to the UK for nine months. And how are you finding it?

I'm enjoying being in the UK. So many support and people are very welcome to me. And were you always this good at English or have you learned since you arrived here? I've learned English in school, but it's just general knowledge. But my speaking English, I got here for this nine months. Well, that's incredible. Thank you for doing this in English.

I'm sorry my Ukrainian is so bad. What do you think of the food in England? Just quickly, is it all right? Not too bad, but... Not too but not and do you miss ukraine yes of course because um i can't forget my previous life my 20 years which i live in ukraine i left behind my father my brother or my family i still uh continue my online education in my medical university in Kyiv. So I can say I live in two countries, like share my life in two countries. Well, we're lucky to have you here.

So thank you. Thank you for coming here and adding to life in this country. Where did you grow up? So I was born in east of Ukraine, Donbass. It's Lugansk region, small town. And I lived in Lugansk region until 2014, when the first conflict started, when was the Crimea next. And my hometown as well was occupied by Russians. And when you were growing up, were you aware of different communities? Were some people Russian? Were some people Ukrainian? Or was everybody Ukrainian?

They were all Ukrainians, but we were too close to Russia. So my town was too close to Russia. It's just a couple of hours. Most of people speak Russian. So we were more close to the Russian propaganda. So it was Ukraine. It's still Ukraine, but people speak Russian most of the time. And did people, when you were growing up, did some people look back to the old days when you were all part of the Soviet Union?

Did you notice people around you who wanted to be part of Russia, who felt more Russian than Ukrainian? people around you who wanted to be part of Russia, who felt more Russian than Ukrainian? Some people think, as I remember, that if we will be like with Russia, we will have a better life. It was illusions. I don't know. A lot of people didn't have enough salary, had a so poor life in a small village and town. And probably if we will be with Russia, we'll be better. But it's not. But, you know, lots of people, when the conflict in Donbass started, so my family, we understand we don't want to be under the Russians and we moved to the centre of Ukraine.

And lots of people did like that, but elderly people, they can't leave their house where they spent all their life. So they agree with all the political situation which was going on in Donbass. At the time, the rest of the world, we said, well, is it a Russian invasion of Donbass? Or are these local people who want to join Russia? Is it really Russia doing this? Was it clear to you that it was Russia trying to conquer parts of your home, parts of the Donbass? Yeah, yes, sure. So lots of Russian people came to our territory and they pushed people to make this decision, work the propaganda. And lots of voices felt like not real, that people want to be in Russia. And it is easy to manipulate people and use Donbass to split the Ukraine, I think.

manipulate people and use tombas to split the Ukraine, I think. And so then you were living as a refugee inside Ukraine. Was that hard? Were you hearing stories of people losing their lives in the fighting? Did it feel like something that affected the whole of Ukraine or just one small corner of it? It took very close to my heart, every story, every single losses. And I've got lots of friends around the Ukraine with so terrible stories like they lost their house they lost their family their fathers who fight and so Ukrainians we

kept together since the full-scale war. We kept together. And it's not just in the corner. It's all the Ukraine. And even if you're unsafe, you do something, you donate, you speak out, talk different stories from the south of Ukraine. Now it's Bakhmut, when it was a terrible situation in Irpin and Bucha, Kiev region. So I feel like I live this as well, but I was in a more safe place. I was lucky. Let's talk about what Russia has done the last year and think about some historical examples.

Like, if you are going to fight a war, if Russia decides it is going to try and, what it regards, taking back Ukraine, what have you got to get right? Before the wheels even roll, before anyone's fired a shot, what have you got to get right? Number one is strategy. And it's not just what Russia's got wrong. And we can talk in a minute about the West totally screwed this up in Iraq and Afghanistan. We didn't have a clear strategy. And what a strategy is, I mean, it's the most overused word. I mean, it crops up in business and politics and all that. You know, oh, we've got a strategy for everything from homelessness to nurse retentions, everything.

But specifically what a strategy is, is a realistic plan that is resourced. And by realistic, I mean looking at the way the environment is, i.e. your intelligent understanding of your enemy and the world environment, can you achieve that plan? And if you look at what Russia's done, there are a number of things that mean that the strategy was simply not realistic. So for instance, it was really under-resourced. If you want to invade a country and depose a government of 44 million people, then you need more than 150,000 troops. And you also need to have a realistic understanding of your enemy. And Russia here drastically underestimated the degree to which the Ukrainians would fight

drastically underestimated the degree to which the Ukrainians would fight to defend their homeland, right? And, you know, people really do fight to defend their homeland. And we see that all the way through history. And then you also need to have a realistic understanding of the strength and capabilities of your own armed forces. And here, President Putin had vastly overestimated the capability of the Russian armed forces. And really, it was a force that had been hollowed out by corruption over, well, particularly over the last 20 years and over the last 10 years. And it's also a force that had gone big on high end kit. So it looked really good when they did the parade in the Red Square every May. They do the victory parade it looked fantastic but when you scratch the surface you found that actually the

tires on those trucks have been swapped out for cheap chinese ones so they just fell apart when they got into a war zone you found that they hadn't got enough infantry they had too many tanks you need infantry to protect tanks and tanks protect infantry. So actually really quite basic stuff that if you knew anything about military, you wouldn't allow to happen. And yet they did. And all of those failings really are wrapped up in. I mean, this is the big weakness of autocracies is that the leaders, particularly ones that have been around for, you know, Putin's been in power for 20 years now, they get surrounded by yes-men because they get rid of all the people who disagree with them, or people just learn to self-censor.

And so when Putin says, you know, we're going to go and invade Ukraine, there might be a couple of dissenting voices, but most people go, yeah, yeah, great idea, great idea, sir, because that's kind of how the system works. You get to the top by saying, yes, Mr. Putin, that's a great idea. And that's kind of how the system works. You get to the top by saying, yes, Mr. Putin, that's a great idea. And that's exactly what happened. And then compounding that, we'll talk about logistics in a second. You've mentioned logistics there.

And because, as we know, amateurs talk about tactics, professionals talk about logistics. But strategically, there's this wonderful book that you and I have both read, I'm sure, called The Allure of Battle, which basically goes, look, rather than face difficult choices and realise the extent of this undertaking you're about to embark on, you do what the Germans did in World War I and World War II, which you think, I know what we'll do. We haven't really got the resources we need to win this war. But what we'll do is we'll fight such a stunningly brilliant initial opening campaign that it

will kind of knock the other guy out. And as Hitler said during the invasion of the Soviet Union, Barbarossa, we're just going to kick the front door in and the whole rotten structure will come in. They thought, you know what, we're going to get on our bikes, we're going to dash to Ukraine, the whole thing will fall apart like a house of cards, and then it will be over, right? And that operational plan comes from this idea that it's overconfidence, right? The Ukrainians are rubbish. Yeah, it's overconfidence.

Here's the thing, to get to be a leader, you're probably a pretty confident person and you're also probably an optimist because you're used to telling stories because you tell stories because that's why people follow you. And when you get to be the leader of a country, you just carry on doing that.

And that's why you need to have people around you saying, you know, like whispering into the emperor, you know, you haven't got any clothes. That's why you need to have people around you saying, you know, like whispering into the emperor, you know, you haven't got any clothes. That's why you need those people who are saying, no, no, no, this is a terrible idea. And the people who say yes, just then reinforce that overconfidence. And so that results in you thinking your forces are better than they are, and thinking that the enemies are worse. And then the other thing, this goes back to your Blitzkrieg analogy in World War II. What the Germans felt they had there, and in fact, they did, right, in 1940, certainly in Western Europe, was they had a new

technique of armoured warfare. So they had good tanks that were fast and the logistics worked, and I know we're going to come on to logistics in a minute, and they had a new aggressive style of warfare that hadn't really been tried out. And in that instance, it worked. And that was largely because the Belgians, the French, the British Expedition Force weren't that well organized. They were a bit late off the mark, but it didn't work against Russia at all. So that technology, those new way of thinking couldn't save them when they went up against Russia. That's right.

And I guess if Putin had gone to his planners and they'd gone, well, you know, you reckon you'll need 3 million men and it will cost a lot of money. It'll take two years. Instead, he's like, I'll do it with 100,000 and we'll just waltz in and assassinate. Yeah, it'll be fine. It'll be fine. And so that's interesting how the plan is all a fault of the terrible assumptions you're making at the beginning. Then let's talk about those logistics. You said 100,000 troops isn't enough. I mean, that sounds like lots of troops to people. Can you put that in context? Why is that nowhere near enough troops?

Well, there's some basic sums that you should run in your head. Dan, if you're ever planning to invade a country, here are some sums that you should do. I've got my notebook out. I've got my notebook out. Yeah. Rule number one is you need at least three times as many attackers as you need defenders. And if there's particularly difficult terrain like cities or swamps or any of that, it might be five to one or ten to one.

I mean, the numbers are absolutely vast. So if the Ukrainian army is about 150, which I think is what it was at the beginning, and that's not, you know, got to add on all the territorial defense and all the kind of reserve units and all the rest of it. Then you end up with a figure that is at least six, 800,000 or something like that. That's your basic calculation. Then on top of that, you've got to think, okay, but as I take territory, I'm then going to have all these lines of communication logistics, right? And that's how I get oil, petrol, ammunition, all that stuff that I need to my forward troops. But all of those lines of communication need to be defended. So that's more troops. If I'm going to take and hold cities, well, if the population is hostile, I probably need one soldier for every 10 inhabitants. So if it's a city of a million

people, I need 100,000 troops in the kind of environs of that city to control it. So you start to see in a country of 44 million people, actually really quickly, these numbers become just completely impossible to achieve. So your figure of 3 million, I mean, that's probably not far off. I mean, I would say at least a million and a half. And I think if you look at when the Germans came in with army group south in Barbarossa, they did sort of three thrusts and they won through the Baltics, one kind of heading to Moscow, one down in the south to go into the oil fields and the Caucasus. I think they had about one and a half million men in army group south. And that was just one thrust against Russia, right?

There were other thrusts going on in the Baltics and elsewhere. So it's not like history wasn't a guide to what had happened before. It's also interesting because Putin framed this war as the Ukrainians were Nazis, Nazis had taken over Ukraine. They sort of wrapped the war in the patriotic narrative from the Second World War. So it's interesting they didn't learn some of the basic lessons from the Second World War. Margot describes the Russian assault on Kiev. Let's have a quick listen to her. Can we talk about February last year? You were living in Kiev at the time the Russians invaded.

Right, so 24th of February is the day when Putin launched a full-scale invasion. Just the day before, all the Ukrainians, they lived their peaceful life. They were working, they went out and we don't need to be liberated by the Putin. I still remember, I can't believe that I woke up at 5 a.m. in the morning to the sound of the series of explosion. It just was near me and I hear the voice from plane.

Obviously, it was not a civilian, and I fall down in panic attack. I was realizing that, yes, this is a war. I woke up my friends and I took my emergency suitcase and I went outside with thoughts, I need to get to my family. So my brother and father and mother, we all were in different cities of Ukraine. So it was tricky to get together. Everywhere, I just hear the wheel noise from suitcase. People just, they didn't actually know where to go, just leave the Kiev because the Russian,

the first one they were in Kieviv, in Kyiv region. If it's not too painful to ask, what were people nervous about? Were they nervous about being killed in the fighting? Were they nervous about being treated badly, violently, sexually assaulted by Russians? What were people most worried about? First day, first weeks, people didn't actually realize all the terrible things of the war. So the first thing is how to survive, not to be killed by the Russian rockets. Or I remember how the Russian tanks in the center of Kiev went over their car with people inside and killed them. So you couldn't predict what can be with you. And then I can say that in two weeks when people realized that it's really war

and we need to be together, we need to do something, we need to make a resistance, we need to donate, we need to make a resistance we need to donate we need to help our army so everybody everybody just realized that the future of our country is just in our hands not just army we fight in the internet we share the correct information what's going on in our country so no nazis we are free we don't need to be liberated. Because people outside, people in Russia, I've got lots of friends in Russia, they kept silence. They don't want to accept that this is the war which Russians start. So it's just some special operation. And did you try and leave Kiev?

Yes, I left Kiev. So first I went to the tube, and then the parents of my friend, they evacuated me to another region of Ukraine by car. It was a dangerous road, but hopefully I got to another region where my father pick up me and we went to another region where my parents live. It's more safe because it's a smaller town. All the road was like you went through the tanks, all the military things under the sirens and you

understand okay if I don't get to the home right this is my life I go to the Kremenshuk and next couple of months I live as my parents in Kremenshuk, Baltav region. In those first days, did you think, well, Russia is going to win? If be honest, like the small Ukraine and a big Russia with lots of military potential. If be realistic, but I saw how Ukrainians stand. I think we will take our time. And it's in our blood. It's impossible to kill us. So no, really, not really. But we, the Ukrainians, they understood for what they are fighting.

We are protecting our country. But Russians didn't. They didn't for what they are fighting. We are protecting our country, but Russians didn't. They didn't know what they are doing. This is one of the reasons why we should win. When did you begin to hope, you begin to see the Ukrainians were doing well, the army was doing well against the Russians? When the Kiev was liberated, just first month, and then in April was all the Kiev region was liberated. So the risk of rocket attack, but Russian just on the east side now. So it was a couple of months where I can see that they're really good.

They can fight. They liberated our country. So why I shouldn't be confident that Ukraine can win? And as well, help from other countries. So it was slow. It was slow. But every month, like, we get a big support from Europe, from the United Kingdom. And it's helpful, like helpful to fight against the Russians. Do you have friends, men and women, who are fighting at the moment? I've got friends who were died during the fight.

Now, I'm a medical student. I've got lots of friends who are now on the front line, like the nurse, also who help in the Kiev hospital, in surgical units. I can't do anything because I'm not a doctor, I'm not a nurse, on the first months of the war. So I felt useless, but I want to do something. But my parents just say, we don't allow you to go. But I was ready. I was ready. Do you hear about the fighting through social media, through family, friends? Do you hear about what it's like now on the front?

Yes. I don't have a full picture because, you know, it's difficult to share everything. But I know it's every day, the massive killing of people. I remember a lot of story in Mariupol when people just, they drink the water from the rain. But lots of people, they don't have electricity, anything like that. And under the sirens. And, you know, yesterday was a big, massive attack, at least 17 missiles.

So they again hid their energy infrastructure. They want to completely leave people without internet connection and all the basic life things. You listen to Dan Snow's history more after this. Over on the Warfare podcast by History Hit, we bring you brand new military histories from around the world. Each week, twice a week, we release new episodes with world-leading historians, expert policymakers, and the veterans who served from the greatest tanks of the Second World War. And so what are you actually trying to get out of your tank? You're

trying to get maneuverability and you're trying to get a really big gun. Your Tiger and your Panther there to dominate the battlefield, primarily on the Eastern Front and in North Africa and all that sort of stuff. But by the time they're actually coming in in decent numbers, that moment has already passed. Through to new histories that help us understand current conflicts. Any invader, any attacker, any adversary will exploit gaps within society. It was true then, it's true today. But the Finns signalled that they were united, and I think that's what the Ukrainians should signal today too.

Subscribe to Warfare from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts and join us on the front lines of military history. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were

rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Mike, we heard Margot there talking about what it was like, the panic of being in Ukraine, the sense that civilians were being targeted. Was that basically Putin's plan? He'd basically drive a gigantic wedge thrust towards the capital city, towards Kiev, and then hope that everything falls into place? It's a bit of a hit and hope kind of strategy, isn't it? It is. So it comes back to your assumptions that you're talking about. So one is about the military capabilities of the Ukrainians. So if we do a shock and awe thing, if we have an armoured thrust that goes there quickly, they'll just scatter and fall apart and they won't be able to fight.

The other assumption is something about, and this is really interesting, it's something about how Putin viewed Ukrainians, I think, as a race and Ukrainian civilians. And clearly there is an assumption, and we've seen this more recently in the war, as they've attacked power plants and bombed cities. And as retribution, they hit tower blocks full of people for military activities. I mean, war crimes, we're talking about war crimes here. But the assumption that underlies that is the Ukrainians are a lesser people. If we just hit them hard, they'll just get scared and they'll run away.

And that's the same, actually, you know, again, to revisit the Second World War. But it was the last major conflict on the European soil. That's exactly what Hitler felt when he switched to the Blitz in London. Right. He famously was attacking all of the RAF targets and they were very, very close to completely defeating the RAF, which had obviously laid open Britain for invasion. defeating the RAF, which had obviously laid open Britain for invasion. But at that point, they switched to attacking civilian targets and bombing cities because the feeling was, well, the citizenry are weak. And if we bomb them, they'll panic and they'll get scared and the Brits will sue for surrender. And in both cases, in London in 1940, and also in Ukraine, actually, it does the opposite. Because people say, well, actually, we're not going to get,

no, we're not going to get cowed in submission we're going to fight even harder because you've killed my uncle now right now it's personal and so that assumption of well the ukrainians are weak and we're going to bond them into submission actually it turns out to be the complete opposite margo actually describes that a very moving part of the interview that we had. It was in UK, it was 27th of June. I felt like I need to call my father who was in Kramnichuk in the centre of Ukraine. And I called him in just a few minutes and I heard the three massive, through the phone, explosions. And I said, like, father, and he didn't respond.

And the phone call was cancelled. And I think, what is going on? I opened the news, and I saw that the big shop mall with more than 100 people were inside. It's just damage. And my father was going to this shop mall. This is what it's really like for me because when you don't know,

it's just five minutes from my flat. And when I'm back to ukraine in october 2022 and i saw it's just nothing on this big place and lots of people were under these uh damaged supermarkets shop them all yes and it's just something small but i can't imagine what's going on on the front line. Margot talks about how harrowing it is to be on the receiving end of those attacks. And I think we're quite familiar with that. How much have you as an analyst been able to get inside the morale, not of the Ukrainians who we hear a lot from, but of the Russians? What was the state of mind of the Russian forces both before and during this invasion? And how has it evolved over the last year?

So, I mean, the Russian force itself has evolved, right, before we even get to morale. So you started out pre-invasion with the Russians doing these big exercises in Belarus and in the border lands of Russia. And they were told that they were going to liberate Ukraine and free it from its government. I mean, we've heard this narrative before, right, in Iraq and Afghanistan. And some of them were really very, very surprised when they got there and they were attacked, because they had been told that you will be welcomed as liberators. Now, that initial force was comprised of professional army, but also a fair few conscripts as well, who weren't meant to be mixing with the invasion force, but they were because they'd been on the exercise. And so a bunch of conscripts

ended up in the invading force as well. But the Russians have suffered really, really heavy casualties. I mean, really heavy casualties, potentially up to 80, 90, 100,000. We're talking really, really high levels of casualties. And so that force has been replaced in three ways. The first way is that the Wagner Group, which is this private military company, militia group, basically, that's been rampaging all over Africa, has started recruiting from prisons. And so you've got these battalions of prisoners who've basically been offered a deal, if you fight for six months, we'll wipe out your sentence. They're given basically no training, and they're used as cannon fodder. There's no other way to describe it. You've also got this mobilization of 300,000 people. And those guys are not much better

trained, but they're basically civilians with a little bit of military training. And then you've got militias of Chechens as well so Chechnya was a war that Putin fought in the 1990s and the way he eventually won it was by finding his own Chechen leader who was as nasty as he was empowering him and then creating a militia beneath him and then this guy Kadyrov runs Chechnya as a fiefdom basically with loyalty to Putin as the emperor I mean it's really kind of medieval type game of of Thrones type stuff. And those three, like the professional army, the mobilized people, the Wagner group,

and the Chechens are all fighting each other. I mean, not physically, although sometimes physically, but for resources and status. Some will go into that area, some won't go into this area. And then they're all trying to compete for, oh, we've taken this town, so therefore we should be put in charge. And it is a Game of Thrones thing with inside the Russian military and the Russian government as well.

So and all of those groups have varying degrees of morale, like amongst the mobniks. So these are the mobilized people, very low morale amongst the prisoners, hard to get into them. But some have escaped and asked for asylum in other countries and they report really terrible conditions and just no regard for their lives no medical help if they make casualty and all the rest of it don't know much about the Chechens and then in the professional military you've got a real mix of morale but again not great like the Russian military doesn't worry so much about morale and it doesn't worry so much about casualties either. You either go forward or if you come backwards, we'll shoot you. I mean, there is definitely that going on. It's extraordinary in 2022. Historians always have to be so cautious, don't they? You've seen them all do this on social

media when they're like, look, we don't want to be reductive here. We're not just going to say, we've seen all this before. This reminds us of X and Y. But with this war, it's just brutal. The parallels are there, punching you in the face. A couple of things you mentioned there. One is, we'll be greeted as liberators. I mean, how many armies have been told that in the past? Both the Germans going into Ukraine in World War II, you and your generation were told that in, you know, in Kazakhstan. And then we got there and got shot at. And it was like, hang on a minute, but we're here to, what do you mean? Why are you shooting at us? We're here to help you. I mean, obviously combat is traumatic, but you've mentioned that you feel that among your peers, those who've struggled with mental health upon return, it's the dissonance there that's actually added called moral injury. And I don't know whether that's a diagnosable psychiatric disorder,

but lots of these veterans shelters treat it as a thing that they need to deal with. And effectively what moral injury is exactly that. You have a set of beliefs about why you're going somewhere and you're risking your life. Your mates are risking their lives. And then when you get there, the evidence you see in front of your eyes is completely dissonant. And so we're here as liberators, but they're attacking us or, you know, and they're telling us stuff. And it just doesn't match with what the chain of command, if you like, told us. But also when I watch the BBC, what I see on the BBC and then into that dissonance,

what you do is where people have been injured or lost their best friends or seen extremely traumatic things or experienced very traumatic events. That then, if you think about it, is like a bomb going off inside their psyche that then imprints that dissonance. And now, 10 years later, they're still struggling to reconcile those two truths. And I can speak to my own experience. I spent two years almost in helmand and and i was very very lucky i spoke the language so i spoke push to and i was a political officer so i got to travel a lot and speak to a lot of people and i could see both sides of the conflict so i lived that dissonance if you like my work was to explore that dissonance and to try and bring the

sides together and to reduce levels of violence but even so and i had a huge amount of agency right imagine if you're a private soldier and you're just told what to do and you're in that environment but even so when i came back you know i was very very angry about the whole thing and it took me several years to process that and part actually writing an intimate war and writing why we fight were you know cathartic for me to try and process all of those emotions that were coming out as anger. There are a lot of veterans who look back and don't really know how to process those two irreconcilable feelings. And so with that knowledge, can you imagine

what's going on within these Russian, I mean, we say army, but armies at the moment. I mean, you've got appalling conditions. You've got a much, much tougher fight than they were promised or than they expected. You've got leadership that's just lying to them, shooting them on occasion if they retreat, like Stalin ordered in the Second World War. Can you even put yourself in what must be going into their heads as junior leaders, you know, the key guys your age who are trying to maintain some kind of cohesion on the battlefield? Yeah, I think it's really difficult. And I think there's two things I would highlight. One is that, you know, me going to Afghanistan is very different to Russia going to Ukraine because Ukraine used to be part of Russia in living memory, right?

And it has been for a long time. So it would be like, for your British audience, it would be like going to war in Ireland. I have an Irish passport because my grandfather was born in Ireland, right? So imagine if I was a British army officer and then sent to liberate Ireland. Well, indeed, you could argue that in Northern Ireland, that was what some people's perspective on that conflict, that was what that was. So you've got this feeling that you're not only liberating just random people, but people who used to be part of your country. So there's that closeness. There's obviously the familiarity of the language and many Ukrainians speak Russian as their mother tongue and all that kind of stuff.

So that's the first thing. Second thing is, I think autonomy. So the ability for a person to have agency or not. So how much agency you have, I think, is a real psychological protector. So if you're able to decide your own fate and you're put in these very, very difficult circumstances. So let's say you're an officer and your job is to travel around and do things and think about things and offer advice. And so I think that protects you to some degree psychologically if you're able to navigate the environment. But if you have no agency at all, you're just told what to do. The Russian army is very autocratic, like Russian society.

The orders start at the top, they trickle down to the bottom, and you get on with it. And if you don't obey, we'll shoot you. So there's no room for interpretation of orders. There's no room for maneuver. And so I think that compounds those feelings of dissonance for them. They will have no escape. They will have no escape from that polarised, dichotomous, juxtaposed narratives in their head. They'll

have no escape from that. So I think it's going to be a terrible, terrible burden on obviously the Ukrainian veterans, but also the Russian veterans from that fight once it's over. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. over. murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. On that, so the young men, overwhelmingly, I think, young men in the Russian army, who, like you, were young officers whose job is to kind of lead those men into battle. They're at the sharp end. They're in charge of groups of 200, 300 men. How well trained were they? How well prepared was that cadre? How good a job didn't they were able to

do before the war at bringing the Russian army to a point of readiness? It's hard to tell. You know, what we all got wrong was we all felt that the Russian army was going to be much better than it actually turned out to be. I think, interestingly, some of the things that we're seeing in the Russian army now, we actually saw in the Afghan army in 2021. And your listeners will remember that famously, the Afghan army, once the Americans and the Brits and the rest of NATO pulled out of Afghanistan, it took about six weeks for the Afghan army to collapse completely. And one of the main reasons for that was corruption. But corruption has an effect on an army in two ways. Yes, it changes the quality of the equipment, right? So if I, you know, there's a thing to get tires was the example I used, right? I don't know

if you saw this, in the early days of the invasion, there was the tire man. Instant, an international celebrity. He had his like 10 minutes of utter fame, didn't he? It was incredible. And basically, you know, if your vehicle has tires that cost $1,000, because they are bulletproof and whatever, they're not going to get ripped. But the colonel in charge of logistics swaps them out for ones that look exactly the same, but cost $200. And the other $800 goes into his bank account in the Caymans. So corruption affects an army in that way. But it also, to come back to your point, how well prepared were they? If the lieutenant or the captain in charge of 80 or 300 men, like you said, if when payday comes around, he takes 10% of his soldiers pay, which is not uncommon. Or he inflates the number of soldiers that he has,

or he sells off some of their rations. So if he's enriching himself at the expense of his troops, when he then is in a battle and says, right, guys, you need to go left flanking. And then I want you to assault that machine gun position. They turn around and go, you must be joking. And armies are built on trust and mutual respect between the leaders and the lead. There's no other way that it can work.

Well, the only other way that it works is the way that the Russians do it, which is they stick a gun to your head and say, get on with it. So you've got a choice of dying or dying. But that doesn't make an effective army. And so it's this insidious nature of trust breaking down that I think that's the thing that crippled the Russian army. And, you know, they may well have done training and so on and so forth, but actually, it doesn't matter how technically good you are. very good at firing your weapon or you can move your tanks in formation that's fine but actually that's of lesser importance to having that glue that trust and that morale that binds your force together and makes it effective because the reality is is what you do on exercise is fine as soon as you come under fire any weaknesses in the glue that holds your organization together and your organization will just fracture and it'll become completely ineffective because people start looking out for themselves rather than looking out for the team.

And that's where I think the Russian preparation fell down. It's that sort of intangible morale factor that we talk about so much, but it's hard to define and grasp. All the things that you've talked about are things that have affected armies throughout the last few hundred years. There's been much talk in this war, particularly at the beginning, we were fascinated by these new weapons, be they handheld, man-portable weapons, or drones, lingering munitions, the videos that we were getting from the battlefield. Your work seems to emphasise actually the continuities of warfare here. You don't seem to be too struck by how new and shiny this war is.

It feels like it's obeying the laws of military history. Yeah, I think that's right. I think actually every war that comes along, the commentariat go, ah, it's all changed now. Usually half of them are weapons manufacturers, right? They're going, ah, it's warfare's all changed. You need to go and buy these weapons now because they'll help you in the future no look strategy logistics and morale we've sort of touched on so far haven't we and those really are the three most important things if you want to fight a war effectively and that was true go back 10 000 years and you're throwing stones and you're attacking another village. That was true then. And it's true now with loitering munitions and hypersonic missiles.

I guess what I would do is I would make the distinction between the nature of war, which is basically war psychological. It's rooted in human psychology. It's deeply political. It's basically politics with guns rather than words, right? Using violence rather than words to communicate. And it's a product of two of our minds trying to compete. And that's why we see the same dynamics. We see bluff, retreat, attack, deceit, revenge. We see all that stuff playing out because those are human psychological dynamics. And that's really what's happening in a war is we're trying to get the enemy to do what we want it to do. And they're trying to do the same. So we're having this battle, but rather than using

words, we're using projectiles. So that doesn't change. But what does change obviously is the technology, you know, and it changes very fast at the moment. But technology is one of the main reasons why people make mistakes in war. In the initial assessments of this war, people were counting up all the tanks and saying, well, Russia's obviously going to win because they've got all these tanks. But actually, their strategy, logistics and morale were much poorer than the Ukrainians. So it didn't matter how many tanks they had. If they weren't supplied with fuel and the crews weren't of high morale they just became expensive targets and so then you get people who sort of really focus on technology and they say well now we've got drones we don't need tanks but that's not the case because the reason we have tanks is because tanks protect infantry and infantry protect tanks and they

work with artillery the three of those things work together infantry tanks and artillery and that's how you create an armoredoured manoeuvre force, right? And if you take away the tanks, your infantry doesn't have any punch. So tanks and artillery can then go against that infantry. The three of them work together, cancelling out each other's weaknesses and magnifying each other's strengths. So when drones come along, the answer is not, oh, tanks are not necessary anymore. The answer is, well, we need an anti-drone defence system on our tanks. And there's always the bewitching allure of new technology in warfare.

Like it's warfare is one of those areas of human society because it's a competition. It's a really, really important competition because people die. It costs huge amounts of money. So there's lots of technological advances in warfare. You know, penicillin came out of the First World War. Radar came out of the Second World War. And because of those technical advances, we tend to really focus on technology. But actually, technology is always subordinate to humans in warfare.

Warfare is a very human phenomenon. It's not a technological phenomenon. Technology is subservient to human dynamics in warfare. And I think we often forget that. I want to just ask one huge question. Last year, when it all began, I just want to scream. Vladimir Putin was one of the most powerful, feared men on the planet. Everyone thought he had Donald Trump in his pocket. Everyone said his army's the best. He's re-established Russia. Lots of people writing sort of very positive columns about him in the West. And he's been made a laughingstock now through history. He's been one of the great examples of hubris. Adolf Hitler, one of the most powerful statesmen in the world, ends up shooting himself in the face in the bunker. Mussolini's strung up. Hubris. Why is not one of the lessons of history like, don't roll the iron dice? Why do these people do it? Why did Kaiser Wilhelm bestrode the world like a colossus and end up

dying in a hotel on the beach in the Netherlands? Do we think that anyone can relearn the lesson that we should have learned the last time this happened, which is, if you're an unbelievably wealthy, powerful, world-bestriding leader, don't start a war of choice that could potentially get you bogged down and humiliated, and if not worse. Why do leaders do this, man? Because they think that they're different and they don't have the structures in place that hold them back. We talk a lot about diversity, don't we? And I think the most important type of diversity is different personality types. And so some people are going to be risk averse. Some people are going to be risk positive. Some people are going to

like ambiguity. Some people aren't. Some people are going to feel differently about money or whatever. If you can have a team surrounding all these leaders with all these different personality types in it, I would argue that you would end up not making these mistakes. Because providing that you have 30 people, let's say, surrounding a leader who all have different personality types, and we all have different personality types, right? And as we've already discussed, leaders are naturally overconfident. They wouldn't be leaders otherwise. They're used to status disputes. If they're a leader of a country, they've won a series of things that teaches them in their own mind that they're a winner.

Well, and they've taken a series of gambles and been unbelievably lucky, right? Exactly. But they never ascribe it to luck. Of course. Of course. Yeah, true. True. The fact that they're lucky, actually, they all ascribe it to their own magnificent skill. And I think that this is where democracies have a huge inbuilt advantage, because, my God, being a democratic leader is tough. Just look at the UK, right? You've got scrutiny from the opposition. You've got scrutiny from your own party. You've got scrutiny from the media. You've got the civil service. Everyone is telling you different stuff. Famously, the American system was designed to constrain absolute power because it

was a reaction against the British monarchy, right? Which was famously no taxation without representation. So the American system was designed to partition power into different bits that the courts, the Congress and the president, and they all had slightly different powers and they could check some balances. And that's where democratic systems are brilliant because they might be slightly slower moving, but they stop big mistakes being made. And if big mistakes are made,

we can then change our leader. And that's where autocracies might in the initial run be faster moving. So this is President Xi, right? Everyone spent the last 20 years going, oh my God, China's amazing. They can make long-term plans. They can respond to everything really quickly. They can build infrastructure. They can build infrastructure and it's amazingly impressive. But come back to don't look at the stuff that's shiny. Look at the stuff that's important. If you can't form a decent strategy

because you're only one person, everyone's going, yes, presidency, that's a great idea. Then eventually you're going to come unstuck. And then when you come unstuck, you've got a whole bunch of democracies that are joined together by alliance. And the reason those alliances are enduring is because they're based on values rather than personalities. values rather than personalities. And then the autocracies will eventually come unstuck because they're democratic. Enemies are able to rejuvenate and choose better leaders and choose the right leaders at particular times and discard bad ideas and bring in new ideas. And the system self-corrects and rejuvenates, even though it's slower moving than an autocracy. This is mean because no one should be asked to do future prediction, but buddy, what's your spidey sense telling you what's going on?

What are we going to see this year? So the Russian spring offensive has actually already started. We're recording this on Valentine's Day, and it has already started in the east. It's very clear that in Bahmut, Vulida, Kramina up in the northeast, the Russians are starting. They started about a week ago. And one assumes that's in response to about two weeks ago, the announcements that not just tanks, Ukraine an armoured manoeuvre force, which it had before in pieces, but this is a much more capable armoured manoeuvre

force. And the earliest that's going to get there is the end of March, probably. Depends how much training the Western Allies did before the decision was actually made. But, you know, let's say end of March. And so Russia has a window where it can try and take as much territory as possible and come back to this autocratic system. Putin says do this. They've said that their aims are to take the whole of the Donbass, which is these two provinces, Luhansk and Donetsk.

And they've got quite a lot of work to do. Once they've done Bakhmut, they've then got two further cities, Slovyansk and Krematorsk. And then in the north in Crimea, they've got a bit of filling in to do up there. And so they've got quite a lot to do, but they've clearly stepped off. So this is the Russian spring offensive that we're seeing. And if it feels underwhelming and just comprised of massed infantry attacks against Ukrainian minefields and artillery that's because it is and that's because the Russians aren't capable of doing

armoured manoeuvre because they don't have the logistics to be able to do it but logistics obviously if your force is moving 30 kilometers a day it's hard to keep that force supplied. The Ukrainians clearly now are trying to absorb that blow and at some point we're going to see a counter punch from the Ukrainians. My guess is that they're going to try and cut the russian forces in two so if they can cut through the southern axis in between zaparizhia and vulidar there's a you know around mariupol if they can cut through to the coast there on the sea of azov then the russian forces will be in two there'll be sort of the Crimean bit plus that little bit in the south next to Crimea and then the bits in the Donbass in the east that they control.

And once the Russians are cut into two, then it becomes even easier to deal with them. I think this year, 2023, is going to settle the war. I think that the Ukrainians are still going to win it. I think that will become clear by the late summer, I suspect, is the point at which they're going to win it i think that will become clear by the late summer i suspect is the point at which they're going to win it what's really not clear and what i don't see articulated by nato leaders which i'd like to see articulated by them is what happens when the russian military gets defeated in ukraine

what happens to putin because he's bound up with this so one assumes he's going to get overthrown within russia and then who's going to get overthrown within Russia and then who's going to replace him and what does that mean it's necessary that the Russian forces get defeated but I don't think anyone's clear on what the bigger picture is and that for a long time was why the West went backwards and forwards on support Macron was saying no no we need not to humiliate them and all that kind of stuff but actually now they've decided that they are going to support Ukraine properly so Ukraine can win it's not clear what that means for Russia and Putin and so on and so forth. And then, of course, the other big thing, the other reason why it's got to be settled this year is the US presidential elections are next year. way that if the war is like it is now, in say a year's time, that Ukraine won't become a point of difference in that election. If Trump's running, there's no way that that won't be a point

of difference. And if American supplies get cut off, the Europeans will stop doing it. And if that happens, then Ukraine will be in a bad place. Okay. Well, Mike, let's hope the Allied politicians and generals are reading your book. Your book is called? How to Fight a War. How to Fight a War by Mike Martin.

And I hope that many people read it and very few of them ever have to act on its advice. Thank you, Dan. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. See you later. To close off this episode, I spoke to Margot about her thoughts on the future of her country and her hope for the years to come.

Do you think you'll move back to Ukraine one day? Are you feeling positive that you'll go back? Yeah, I feel positive. I believe. It will be not so quickly, but it's my Ukraine, the most kind and peaceful, bright, lovely place. Russians can destroy, kill this place using the violent methods. But Ukraine is my soul. I grew up in Ukraine. I feel Ukrainian. I want to come back to help the medicine. Now I get the good experience with NHS. So I so miss my Ukraine,

my family and Avalbak. Thank you very much for sharing that with us. It's much appreciated and it's powerful for us to remember the human cost of what's going on out there behind all the headlines. So thank you very much, Margot. Thank you. And good luck. The main thing is good luck with your studies and working in A&E. I hope you're learning lots of good experiences and I hope you get back to your wonderful, peaceful country soon. Thank you.

So there it is. One year of conflicts in Ukraine summed up with the insights of our fantastic guests, Mike Martin and Margot Bendeliani. The Russo-Ukrainian war has been utterly tragic, terribly destructive, and it shows no signs of letting up in the near future. It's thrown international markets into turmoil. It's exacerbated a cost of living crisis ever in the world. It's destroyed relations between Putin and the West. and it's plunged Europe into one of the largest humanitarian crises it's ever faced.

It's even raised the prospect of nuclear exchange. As the war rages on, it's only natural that we ask ourselves the questions, what's gone wrong, what's gone right, and where's it all going? And I hope this episode has brought you closer to thinking about some of the answers. you