The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - A New Challenge for Ukraine In Its War With Russia

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

Brian Stewart's regular Tuesday commentary on the war in Ukraine and a new challenge from Russia that has the potential to change the balance of the conflict. Plus how do you block the sun to stop climate change?  

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Is there a new challenge for Ukraine in its war with Russia? We'll get to that with Brian Stewart in just a moment. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. First of all, an admission. Yesterday's program on book business inside the book business world appears to have been quite popular with many of you. We've received quite a few emails as a result of it. But let me say something about yesterday's programming, because it's worth noting.

I recorded that broadcast last Friday, and there was a reason for that. Yesterday, I was going to be in New Orleans. And as a result, I often do the program from on the road. As you know, I did it in Banff a couple of weeks ago, in Charlottetown, in Halifax. I've done it from the Arctic. I've done it all over the place, and I've done it from Scotland. But I guess I was just a little gun-shy about, and that's the wrong word to use, but I was a little shy about taking my podcast equipment,

which is kind of bulky and cumbersome, through yet another series of security checks to get in and out of the U.S. So I decided, okay, I'm going to do this program on the book business, which isn't, you know, related and time sensitive. So I'll package it early. And I did that on Friday and it went out yesterday. I mentioned that story for a couple of reasons. One, to be obviously upfront with you. But second, also about this whole idea of going through security,

which has become such a pain for all of us who travel a lot by air, especially as it turns out in many Canadian locations, especially Pearson Airport in Toronto. But there are a couple of bright spots on the horizon there was a test case going on in heathrow a couple of months ago when i was going through in london and um just on one lane but you were basically able to keep everything you had in your bag you didn't have to take laptops out you didn't have to take your shoes off all that stuff you just put your bag your bag on the conveyor belt, and that was it. But I've been back through Heathrow a couple of times since, and that doesn't exist anymore.

It's back to the traditional way that we've had for the last, you know, 20-odd years since 9-11. But not in New Orleans. Yesterday I arrived at the security coming back to Toronto. And it was, there were huge lineups, but they moved really quickly, very efficiently. There were two parts to it. First of all, before you got to the conveyor belt thing, you were checked by a dog, I guess, for explosives. And that's very quick, very quick.

They do it while you're moving in the line. And then you get to the conveyor belt, and it was just like that test I saw in London at Heathrow, where everything, you didn't have to take anything out of your bag. What a difference that makes. It's very quick. You're through in seconds. And if it's taken 20 years to come up with this technology, well, hallelujah, it's here now.

But it's at least there at the Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans. I was in New Orleans to speak with the International Foundation of Employee Benefits Plans. They're a big group. They're basically the people who work on your pensions and your benefits plans if you're in a company or a company or a public service that that has such things and they've been trying to get me for a few years you know two years ago was supposed to be their convention was in Halifax but then you know they lost out on it because of COVID last year was supposed to be in Las Vegas.

They'd invited me to come down and speak to them there as well, but that one was canceled because of COVID. So this year, they were hoping they would be able to follow through on their plans for New Orleans, and in fact, they did. And it was a huge group. I mean, the group I spoke to on Sunday evening, there were, I think, 1,350 people there. And it was great.

And we had a good discussion, a good presentation. New Orleans is a fabulous city. I don't know how many of you have been there, but I've been there a number of times. And I'm always struck by the diversity of that city, its passion, its music, its culture, its determination to face difficulties. And we all know about the floods, et cetera. But I stood for a while on, I guess it was Sunday morning, on the banks of the Mississippi near the Gulf of Mexico and just watched for a while.

And you tend to forget these old trade routes and how still today, centuries later, they are still so important to the well-being and the health of that nation. And it never stops. The traffic coming into New Orleans, going out of New Orleans, whether it's the big tankers, cargo ships, those container ships, they're stacked so high you figure, how the heck did those things not fall off? And, you know, interspersed every once in a while,

the old tourist-driven paddle-wheel boats, dinner cruises, evening cruises. But you could just, you never had to wait long to see the next boat go by. Because they were just, it was like traffic, clockwork. It was just one after the other, going one way or the other, coming in or going out. So it was a good trip. All right, I'm not here to talk about that. It's Tuesday. It's Brian Stewart Day. And Brian's got a different kind of message

than the one we've been hearing for the last few weeks. And so let's not listen closely, because there's the potential for things to change in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. And Brian, once again, is not saying they will change. He's talking about the potential for change in the balance of things. So let's listen up. Brian Stewart, former, you know the story,

war correspondent, foreign correspondent, good friend of mine, based on a huge admiration on my part for his work over decades of covering conflict in our world and the lessons he's learned from it. So here we go. This week's conversation with Brian Stewart. So Brian, one of the things that we've assumed

for these last, actually, couple of months is that Russia's losing the battle on the battlefield, but they may be winning the battle in a different way, and that is by throwing the country, Ukraine, into darkness. Talk about that. Yes, they're already talking about this in Ukraine as the darkest days coming up during the winter. This is really an extraordinary

air offensive that the Russians have launched with cruise missiles and those Iranian drones that are taking out the power grid the water grid the uh the point where 10 million people it's hard to imagine this have no heat no water no no electricity in a major modern society. It really is an extremely dangerous situation. So dangerous that members of the government have suggested that millions of Ukrainians should at least temporarily leave the country even to take some strain off the struggling electricity grid, which is needed for not only whatever homes they can get electricity to, but hospitals and the military use of it.

It's just a bleak time getting bleaker by the day. And one should say that it's bringing a lot of people of course are having to shelter together and this is bad at a time when the health care system really in ukraine is is fragile i mean it's been making great strides in recent years to come back from to komoda rather a a very distrusted, a corrupted past and getting better year by year. But now it's been overwhelmed by these these challenges of war. I mean, this is a society in darkness, increasingly shoved together where Omicron is still spreading. Ukraine has a very, very low vaccination rate, only 35% for the first jab.

Measles are running very strong. Polio is making a comeback. And you have the fifth highest drug-resistant TB rate in the entire world. So it's a fragile system that's struggling to deal with a population that wasn't the healthiest at the very best of times and now certainly is not at the best. You know, when we talk about, you know, the loss of power, the grid going down as a result of the effective, I guess, pinpoint bombing of the drones goes into, you know, deep depression and people, the morale

drops considerably. We're talking about a country at war. And as you explained, there's going to be cities that are going to be without power for days or weeks at a time, if not longer. What is it doing to the overall morale of the Ukrainian people? Well, remarkably, it hasn't really damaged it all that much. The morale of the Ukrainians is astonishingly high. They realize they're in a very hard war. They're helping each other out to wonderful degrees. It's very much the Blitz spirit, reminding one again of London, 1914,

and other cities in the world where people have come together to help their neighbors and do everything they can. They think they're still going to win. There's a huge percentage of Ukrainians that are convinced they're going to win this war. So these are wonderful high morale levels they're at. The real test is yet to come. As I say, the darkest days are coming upon us. And, you know, when you talk of the Russian offensive, several analysts have pointed out that the air war,

brutal, vile, vicious though it is, it may be the only coherent strategy the Russians have had in this war so far. They've completely bungled a land war to a remarkable degree. But in the air, there's a kind of program they're following. So far, there have been 700 attacks on healthcare centers. That's a really extraordinary number. And what makes institutions like the World Health Organization highly suspicious that these are targeted is the same thing happened in Syria when the Russians got involved. Their strategy there was if you're going to attack a city, first you take out the hospitals, then you take out any health care centers,

and then you launch the attack so nobody's there to even look after the injured. 700 attacks on healthcare centers across Ukraine. And in Syria, there were 600 attacks on healthcare centers, and over 900 healthcare workers were killed, all very, very suspicious. So you've got a situation where the population is facing lots of illness. Paternity wards need incubators. Blood banks need refrigerators. Intensive care units need ventilators. They've got very little of the things they need en masse. And at the same time, of course, you're going to have a mental health crisis who wouldn't have it. Cities that go under this kind of bombardment and towns, small towns,

town villages that go under this kind of bombardment have terrible mental health challenges to look after. Even getting medicines that are needed, it becomes a big daily challenge. And we should pause for a second. The casualties, 17,000 civilian casualties so far, over 6,500 have been killed and 10,000 injured. That's on top of all the military wounded that are coming into hospitals. Of those, by the way, of 378 boys and girls, young boys and girls were killed and 37 children in these relentless attacks. So really, you've got a situation where things can't get much worse than they're getting now.

So what they're doing is the biggest priority to help Ukraine at the moment, the biggest priority by far, is to get in anti-aircraft systems, get in as much as you possibly can. It's a large country. It needs a lot of cover. It's not like Israel, a know, a very small iron dome suitable country. So it's got to get the best it can from the Western world because here's the huge problem. And this is a nightmare problem, really. The Ukrainians have been using very effectively systems from the Soviet era against aircraft and anything flying, cruise missiles, the S-300s and the SA-11s have been all very effective. And in many ways, they chased the Russian Air Force out of the country

to the point where the Russian Air Force, for all but a few days at the beginning, weren't even flying over Ukrainian space much. But the Ukrainians are starting to run very low on the ammunition for those systems. And when they run low, completely out of the ammunition for those systems, that would open the door to the mass fleets, huge, gigantic fleets of Russian top-notch aircraft coming in and really hammering the city, going after vital supplies like railways, which have hardly been touched so far in this war. And Ukraine depends so much on railways. They would be a key target right away. So things could get much worse very fast. So that's

why Ukraine needs an enormous amount of weaponry coming in from the West. And Peter, we've discussed before, there's a catch there you run into when you need to ask for that. And that's because so many of the, most of the military, in fact, I'd say all of the military of NATO, for instance, have very low stockpiles themselves of weapons to give. They don't have much because guess what? For years, all the wars that the West fought in really had no air challenge. There certainly was no much challenge in Gulf War, in the Iraq invasion in Afghanistan. So they let run down a lot of these systems for controlling the the sky from shooting down enemy objects whatever they be may be um so russia obviously has a smart tactic

brutal awful of trying to soak up all the ammunition that ukraine can fire at its objects in the sky and And when those are out, unless the West can come up with an extraordinary flow of anti-aircraft weapons, and there's some very good ones. The Germans have the Gepard, and the British and the Americans and the Scandinavians have excellent systems.

But do they have enough to get in to really protect Ukraine? I think that's going to be one of the great challenges of the war. Maybe even a turning point if they fail, and maybe a real success, if they do succeed in getting enough in there, because the Russians, they only have so much to fire themselves. Okay, let me back you up on a couple of these points and just get further explanation

on it. As far back as I can remember in this year, the request to Canada, and I think they've even been in some of the speeches that Zelensky has given to Canadian audiences, have been help us on the air defense system front. So that call has been going out not for days or weeks, but for months. Has anyone responded to that? I mean, Canada, I'm not sure, has the ability to respond too much on air defense systems. But that's been a common plea to other countries,

whether it's the Americans or the British or the French. Have they been getting any help on that front? Oh, yes, they have. I mean, Canada actually can't give much because it has not much of its own to protect its own troops that go to Europe to uh to be on guard um yes there has been a reply the americans have been sending in some some excellent anti-aircraft including sting singer missiles and the rest of it and long range missiles and the british have just given a new order of a lot going in the french have sent sent some, not too much, but some. The Germans have

this wonderful Gepard that fires 35-millimeter shells, like almost a rapid-fire Gatling gun, and it can take down the drones one after the other. And let's face it, most of the cruise missiles and most of the drones are shot down. up to 80% of the cruise missiles. And they're expensive, get blown up in the air, and then they fall to the ground. But it's never quite enough. And the problem is, these countries are all looking at themselves and saying, well, let's take the Americans, for example. They're looking over their shoulder at the same time at Taiwan. What happens if Taiwan is faced with an imminent invasion from China? They're going to want all our anti-aircraft

systems. They want them now. They want as many as we can get. Other allies are saying, you know, we're getting very low here, and it's a dangerous world there. What can you give us? So the pleas for American help, and they've provided at least 70% of all the help going into Ukraine. It's just nonstop. And they're also getting calls from their own Pentagon saying, look, we can't give everything away to Ukraine and Taiwan and all these other countries. What happens if we fall into a major war in the meantime? We need to protect our own. So this is going on all the time. And the big problem, of course, is that it's not like the Second World War, First World War.

You just order more workers in and churn out more shells. Things are so technical now that to increase production from, say, 60 of one system, Heimer, say, just 60 of one system up to 80, could take nine months to get that, just the increase. You might have to build a new factory even to get that increase. And new factories are being built. There's a lot of orders going on to basically Western and, I should say, Japanese and South Korean factories as well for armaments. But it all takes time now because it's so technical. And then, of course, when it does arrive, you need to have people who are technically savvy in order to run them. So you need massive training programs.

Now, I don't want to sound too gloomy here because, you know, the Ukrainians always find a way, it seems. They have one of these remarkable abilities to make do with what they've got. And they entered the war with a lot of trained, excellent soldiers, and they've shown themselves time and time again to be brilliant innovators. But I think it's a very nervous time. You can tell by the kind of statements coming out of Kiev that the Ukrainians are nervous. And again, I go back to that scenario. If they can't clear the skies of Russian objects flying through them, you are going to see the reemergence of the Russian Air Force. And it's gotten a lot of slack in this world war because it hasn't really been performing well.

It's been trying to reduce its casualties. But they have very, very good planes, and they have a lot of them, and they have a lot of pilots who've been spending the last nine months training for missions. What would happen if it was able to come in and, say, take out the entire Ukrainian rail system, which is so vital to that country. The West simply can't let that happen. If it lets that happen, then it's staring at perhaps a lost war. I want to get to that in a minute with a closing question,

but one more question on this issue of armaments. Is it safe to say that we are we are well past the going to the stockpiles from these countries that are supplying ukraine that we're now into the factory building of new weapons systems and new artillery shells etc etc yes that's and that's a good question because we are entering the new world it's going to affect the economy of the world in the future. We are going into what really is an industrial-scale war now where stockpiles can't provide everything. And you've got to start building a massive rebuilding, military rebuilding period. And again, I have to keep raising the name Taiwan as well, because there's a second

front that could be opening up there. We never know when. And this is happening in Russia as well. Intelligence is picking up indications that the Russians are using double and triple staffing now in their ammo factories just to pour out as many shells as possible, because they are running low. I mean, everybody is standing back shocked. They shouldn't be shocked. I mean, there's no excuse to be shocked at how much ammunition modern war uses up when it's large scale, because we really haven't seen it since, you know, Second World War,

anything like this. But thousands of rounds, I think the Americans have provided something like 850,000 rounds of 155 millimeter shells, 850,000. And that's not enough to keep up the barrages the Ukrainians keep firing at the Russians. And of course, the Russians are firing back. So I don't know where they're coming up with their shells because they've been going at blast at it since February the 24th, nonstop, every day, thousands of shells. You just have to do the vague mathematics in your head. And this is an absolutely ruinous way to live going to major war you know you use up your well your national wealth you use up your national health you use up factories for things that blow other things up

it's it's a crazy way to live but it happens throughout human history and now we have a major one on our hands and you know a moment ago said, I don't want to sound too gloomy here, but quite frankly, for the past 20 minutes, this discussion has, for the first time in a couple of months that we've been having these chats, would seem to indicate there is the potential for a shift here in the power balance. The Ukrainians, as we said off the top, seem to be winning on the battlefield,

but the battlefield is now a lot larger and a lot more diverse than the one we've been talking about over these past couple of months. And it seems, at least that's what I'm taking away from this conversation, is that if the Russians have an opening, they're seeing it from the air and they're seeing it from this issue of armaments supply. I think that's right. I think everywhere now on the front lines, apart from some areas where the Russians keep attacking, attacking, attacking, sometimes 100 attacks a day. That's hard to imagine what they are. They're digging in. They're digging in very strongly, sometimes 40 kilometers behind the front.

So they're obviously going to try and hold what they've got. In the meantime, they throw everything you possibly can over the skies of Ukraine, hoping the Ukrainians will fire off every anti-aircraft system and bit of ammunition they've got, and then leave themselves essentially denuded for one of the most technically advanced air forces in the world to come in on a real killer mission. And if that happens, you could easily see the war becoming unsustainable for Ukraine sooner than it will become unsustainable for Russia. For both of them, there's an unsustainability line. But if Ukraine loses the air war, I think that will move it towards that line far faster. Now, having said that, I don't think

that'll happen because I think the world is responding, and the Western world is responding very well to the Ukraine crisis. And the bottom line here is that there's been no sign of real fatigue across Western Europe or North America about supporting the Ukrainians. The Canadians are very much behind that the Americans are and the Europeans are astonishingly solid I never expected nobody ever expected they'd be this solid clearly the Russian brutality the very thing we're talking about this incredibly cruel nature of its attacks is just telling you know informing Ukraine Europeans over and over again. We can't possibly allow that to win because how would that change our world if that kind of behavior actually won in modern countries?

You know, a week ago- It would be the darkest days for all of us, not just Ukraine. A week to 10 days ago, there was talk, there was the urging of negotiations, of trying to find a way to peace. We haven't used that term at all in this discussion today. That seems to now be kind of off the table again. Well, I think it very much is. Neither side, frankly, can see something to negotiate where they're prepared to concede anything. I don't think there's any concession on either side at the moment. I mean, people, what you call negotiation, you can have people talk long distance about one day we'll talk about this or that. But there's no negotiation now in the minds, I think, of Moscow or of Kiev. And I don't think there will be for many, many months, barring some horrific disaster maybe.

We haven't mentioned nuclear plants, but one has to get a bit sweaty of palm every week when you hear about nuclear plants coming under artillery fire. I mean, you've got to wonder what kind of maniacs you're dealing with in the battlefield. But no, I don't think negotiations are possible. And I think it would be, the problem here is the moment the West really starts saying, oh, let's negotiate, let's get into negotiations, that takes the pressure off putin if putin feels he's not getting the quick negotiations he counted on or the quick surrender he counted on that's when he starts worrying that this war is not winnable he's not going to worry about it being unwinnable if people say oh yeah let's meet in

turkey tomorrow let's let's start negotiations up we will give and you'll give and all will be happy again that's when he knows you will have won. We're going to leave it at that for this week, Brian. An important conversation, at times pretty depressing. Which I don't mean to be. No, I get that from you. I understand you're just trying to lay it out as the way it is, or at least the way you see it at this moment.

And as opposed to these past couple of months, this has every indication that things may be shifting a little bit. There may be some movement for the Russians on the Russian side because of the way they're conducting the war at the moment. But as you've warned us all along here, it's awfully hard to predict the way these things are going to happen. And every time you do that, you know, the analysts start doing that. It seems to be it goes the other way. So anyway, on this conversation, Brian, thanks as always. And we'll talk to you again in a week. Okay. Thanks, Peter.

Brian Stewart with us, as he has been on almost every Tuesday since February when the Russians invaded Ukraine. And he'll be with us again next week. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, a couple of end bits of interest. And welcome back. Peter Mansbridge here. You're listening to The Bridge, the Tuesday episode.

And you're listening on Sirius XM, channel 167 Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. And of course tomorrow, being Wednesday, we'll have one of our two video podcasts of the week available. You know, it's still available on Sirius XM, still available as a regular podcast, but also as a video podcast on our YouTube channel.

I get the link, subscribe, no cost. You can find the link in my bio on either Twitter or on Instagram. All right, promised a couple of end bits. Here's the first one. Quick setup. When I lived in Churchill, Manitoba in the late 1960s that's where i you know started my career uh in broadcasting one of the common themes we used to talk about because churchill you know it's on the shores of hudson bay it's cold man it's like it gets pretty cold um and one of the things that used to come up every once in a while is,

why don't we build a dome over Churchill, over the whole community? And then, you know, we can have much more reasonable temperatures, not be impacted by the climate like we are the rest of the time. Well, it seemed like a great idea, but who was going to build it? Who was going to pay for it? So, of course, it never happened. So I'm wondering if this will ever happen. It's the latest idea, and apparently it even has some advocates in the White House in Washington, to stop climate change.

And you need to do that. It's going to take much more than a dome over a little community in northern Manitoba. The idea is to block the sun. It's somehow going to block the sun to reduce its impact on heat, right? Now, it does sound a little bonkers, but nevertheless, it made it into Yahoo News. And it's called, there's a term for this, solar radiation management. Right? It essentially involves spraying fine aerosols

into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth. Now, we're not talking about a guy or a gal up there pushing a little aerosol can. We're talking about some kind of massive movement to do this, right? The idea is that once it's reflected, there'll be less heat and temperatures will go down. Of course. Now, as I said, it sounds a bit bonkers, but as Yahoo reports, the world has actually seen inadvertent SRM, solar radiation management, after large volcanic eruptions, which can throw massive amounts of gas and debris into the atmosphere and block out the sun.

The last big one was in 1816, called the Tambora Volcano Eruption in Indonesia. It was so big, so impactful, that it resulted in what became known as the year without a summer throughout Europe. Okay, so I'm not sure what it is we're supposed to be hoping for here. Some massive volcano is going to block out the sun. And that'll be it for climate change. It'll just stop. Well, we'll see whether that happens. I somehow think that there'll be a dome over Churchill before that happens. Now, here's the final end bit. You know what happens when your parents pass away?

After you get over the shock, even if it was known that it was about to happen, even once you get over the shock, you're left with that task, because my sister and brother and I were left with of, you know, dealing with the belongings, their belongings. And one of the things that I ended up with was a little box that my mother used to keep. And in that box were little notepads and little envelopes. Now, we're talking about a small box, you know,

not much bigger than, say, I don't know, half the size of a briefcase. And I still have it in fact I have it like about a meter away from where I'm sitting at the microphone here in Toronto and all these little notes and cards were for thank you notes

and she felt if she had this little box that it would remind her that she could use these to thank people for whatever they may have done for her. Now, I thought of that when I read a piece in the New York Times the other day. It's headlined,

Do Thank You Notes Still Matter? It's written by one of their reporters, Shivani Vora. And what Shivani argues is that, you know, the thank you note has sort of gone by the wayside. People don't write out thank you notes. And what we've lost as a result of that. And she even talks about how in the old days people used to have little boxes of thank you notes and they'd keep that box in a prominent position to remind them that they should do that.

Well, thank you notes have been replaced by text messages and emails and you name it. But they don't carry that same weight as looking in your mailbox or hearing something pushed through the mailbox on your front door of an actual handwritten note from somebody. Now, the New York Times wanted to go the extra mile in writing this article and so they went to somebody who deals in these kind of things an etiquette coach who came up with this

the ideal thank you note is short and to the point. I like a three-sentence structure, mentioned this expert. Thank the person for the gift or gesture, and then be specific about why you appreciate it. Will you use that scotch that you were given this winter to keep you warm, for example? Or did you enjoy meeting this person's friends and eating the delicious meal they cooked at a dinner party? If the person gave you a gift card or cash, how do you plan to spend it? Tell the person how the gift or act made you feel and how much you

appreciate the time and thought that went into it. That's the how the gift or act made you feel and how much you appreciate the time and thought that went into it. That's the second sentence. Long sentence, but I guess you just pick one of those things. The final sentence can reiterate the thanks and mention your next interaction with the person. For example, I can't wait to see you for dinner in a few weeks, or I look forward to hearing from you about the next steps in the job process. Okay. So now I'm going to look at this little box that my mother kept all those years. That I haven't touched since I moved it here from her place.

I'll look at it differently. And I will try to write a short thank you note. So I'll use what she kept. And I'll try to make some person's day by thanking them for what they did for me in a way beyond a text message. Let's see whether I can hold up to that idea. All right, that's it for this day. This Tuesday, tomorrow, of course, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth. Bruce Anderson will be by. I'm not sure what we'll talk about yet, but something always comes up.

And as being a Wednesday, you'll see the video podcast, if you wish. Sort of you'll watch how we make smoke mirrors and the truth. On Wednesdays. Thursday, of course, is your turn, so don't be shy. Send me a note. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. If you've got anything to say about anything,

whether it was yesterday's book business podcast, today's Brian Stewart thoughts on Ukraine, any of the end bits, they always generate some interest. And tomorrow's SMT. Also on Thursday, the renter returns. He's been hitting them out of the park lately. Very popular little segment it's become. All right.

I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening on this day, and as always, we will be back in 24 hours.