The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Why The Sinking Of The “Moskva” Was So Important.

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

Brian Stewart us back with his latest commentary on the Ukraine war. In this episode, the veteran foreign correspondent focuses on the sinking of the Russian Black Sea flagship, the “Moscow”.  To Brian, this story has been underreported. 

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Today, Brian Stewart checks in once again with his take on in the Highlands in northern Scotland, in the kind of Dornick, Ambo, Goldsby area of Scotland. It's on the northeast coast. And it's been spectacular weather here since we've been here. I know it's been snowing back in central Canada, which seems hard to believe in terms of, you know, mid to approaching late April, but you got what you got. And we're fortunate. It's not

warm necessarily here, but it's been gorgeous, beautiful, sunny weather. And, all right, we're not here to talk about the weather. We're not here to talk about Scotland or central Ontario for that matter. We're here to talk about Ukraine. Yesterday, we checked in on the COVID story, brought, I think, listeners up to date with a, you know, fascinating, blunt interview with Dr. Isaac Bogoch from the University Health Network in Toronto. Today, it's our weekly check-in with Brian Stewart. And Brian, the former war correspondent, former foreign correspondent, in touch with all things defense-related, foreign policy-related.

And he's been watching the Ukraine story each weekend, looking for the angles that aren't necessarily being discussed that much in the world's media. And bringing them to the forefront for us. And he does so again today. Now, for starters, in terms of background, this is a difficult week in Ukraine. You see the story of Mariupol, which has been the focus of some attention for the last few weeks. It's an eastern Ukrainian city, port city, important in that sense with access to the water. And it has been under bombardment from Russian forces for weeks now. And the Russians thought they would have taken it by now. They haven't, but they could be on the verge of taking it.

They claim it could fall today. And what makes it different about that claim is some of the Ukrainian defense leaders are saying the same thing. The Ukrainian forces are pretty well now down to a kind of Alamo situation in the steel plant. It's a giant steel plant in Mariupol. And that's where the holdouts, the Ukrainian defenders are. It's a huge place and it's actually pretty good for combat of that kind in terms of the defense forces but they're running out of people they're running out of ammunition and they're running out of time and they seem to admit that themselves now huddled with the defenders are upwards of a thousand civilians. It's been their hiding place in the basements, the underground tunnels of the steel plant. So you can imagine that.

Women, children, young kids, with this bombardment going on all around them all the time. So that looks pretty grim on all fronts. The Ukrainians won't give up. They won't surrender. At least that's what they've said so far. That they will fight to the last fighter. That's the Alamo comparison. Well, we can only hope and pray that somehow there's a miracle happens

for those Ukrainian defenders. We'll see how this day unfolds. The Russians are making their move throughout eastern Ukraine. They claim that's now all they want after abandoning their attempts to take Kyiv. We'll see how true that is. It's been hard to believe anything the Russians have said since the beginning of this whole episode, but we'll see. Now, at the same time, not everything has gone against the Ukrainians in this last little while. In fact, they had a huge and not just a symbolic victory over the weekend.

And that was the sinking of the Russian ship Moscow. Now, that was reported and talked about to a degree over the weekend. But I'm not sure that we ever got to the real significance and importance of that sinking. And that's what Brian wants to talk about today. So we're going to take a quick break. And then we'll get right into it with Brian Stewart, the former veteran foreign correspondent, war correspondent, who's been right there in the dirty side of war, the ugly side of war. He's seen it close up.

He's reported on it for decades now. And he is one of the, in my view, one of the best read journalists on conflict and on this particular story. And so when we talked the other day, I said, what's not being talked about enough? He said, the Moscow. We've got to talk about the Moscow. So let's talk about the Moscow. So, let's talk about the Moscow. Here's Brian Stewart. Well, Brian, it's good to talk to you again.

And, you know, it's been a little while, but there are a number of things to catch up on. But the thing I find the most intriguing is the story of the Moskva, and that's the Russian naval vessel. And to try and understand its importance for starters you know it's called the Moscow so it obviously is important to the Russian navy and to the Russian government but it has been lost because it appears of a Ukrainian missile now I want you to to tell us the significance and the importance of that loss not only to russia right now but to this conflict overall it's an enormous event i think it's been underplayed if anything in fact a few days after the war the invasion began i began to fantasize about somebody

taking out the moskva and then i'm sure I was not the only person, because anybody old enough to remember the Falklands War 40 years ago this month will remember the importance to a nation when it loses a major ship, like a flagship. And the Argentinians, as we remember, lost their Belgrano. It was sunk by a British submarine. And indeed, the British lost key vessels like the Sheffield and the Atlantic conveyor by attacks at sea. And for some reason, I guess we can all has a bigger prestige and shock value than many events, most events on land or in the air. And the Moskva, to put it in perspective, it was about the same size as the Belgrado, actually. It was 12,500 tons.

It was a major missile cruiser. It was the pride of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. It was also the command and control vessel. It was the one that was supposed to control all the rest of the fleet and protect it with its missiles against its own anti-air missiles and its anti-missile missiles and its anti-missile firing devices was supposed to protect a lot of the other ships of the fleet from being destroyed. And I think to the Ukrainians from the very beginning, they looked at this ship as the pot of gold, if they could get it, both for the propaganda value and for its immense military importance. Because with the Moskva gone, it effectively, I think, robs the Russian fleet in the Black Sea

of any real capability to launch an amphibious landing close to Odessa, which is all being greatly feared if they want to take that last port really in the hands of the Ukraine. Amphibious landing was always a possibility. The Moskva would have been a key part of that, perhaps the key part. And to lose that now to two missiles fired, homemade missiles made by the Ukrainians fired into a ship that was probably one of the most protected ships in the entire Russian Navy is an unbelievable humiliation. And I'm not surprised the Russian government simply cannot bear to admit that it was sunk by enemy fire.

But how it looks any better to them to say a fire broke out and it sank at sea after its own accident with Russia's notorious reputation for bad handling of ammo that has been ongoing for years. I can't see how that's in any better scenario. It's a terrible loss for Russia. It's an enormous military and propaganda gain for the ukraine and it is a very significant really to all the navies in the world we talked a couple weeks ago about perhaps the tank will have seen its day because so many tanks have been destroyed in this whole this war but it's just like they're being carved open like sardine cans by shoulder-fired missiles. That simple method. Well, all the major navies of the world, including the American and the Chinese and the rest of the big ones,

are all worried sick about how vulnerable their major ships are now to missiles fired from land. They don't have to be fired at sea anymore. They can be fired from land. They don't have to be fired at sea anymore. They can be fired from land. They're relatively cheap to make. You can have all the sophisticated devices in the world, but if they can figure out a way to get through those devices, you're going to lose perhaps an aircraft carrier with 5,000 crew members,

or another cruiser like this with 500 to 1,000. So it's a big worry to navies that they have got to come up with a better way to protect these big ships. And they haven't really, they're working on it all the time, of course, but I think the Russians were well behind where the Americans and the Chinese are in terms of protecting their ships and sort of anti-missile, anti-aircraft devices they've got. But still, they've got to be worried after something like this.

I'd say so. And, you know, you've well outlined the importance of the Moskva to the Russian fleet and just the number of different facts and figures that were associated with it. The one you left out was the one that startled me when I really started to think about it. It's, you know, this wasn't just any other ship in the fleet. 600 feet long.

Now, think about that for a minute. That's almost two football lengths, football field lengths of ship. That is one big ship. Now, whether these two missiles the homemade missiles you're making it sound like some guy was making these missiles in his basement or something but you know this wasn't you know this wasn't just a lucky shot obviously they have great faith in in their missile capabilities and and they took out you know the pride of you as you said of the fleet um there a couple of things that that i i find amazing about the story i mean you mentioned earlier

about the belgrano the argentinian battlecruiser or whatever it was that was sunk by the the british submarine at the beginning of the falcons war and then the devastating news when it hit that hms sheffield the british destroyer um had been sunk by an argentinian i think it was an exocet missile that totally changed the kind of face of that conflict in the south atlantic because um the only defense system that they were confident in the british uh to protect their fleet was to have helicopters hovering around their ships to to to attract missiles if they were coming in and then they could do a maneuver if if they did much faster than obviously a ship could do and the reason i remember that and you know he's not talked of with any fondness these days and that's for sure but uh prince andrew was one of those

helicopter pilots it was sort of the last great thing he did back in 1982 during the Falklands War. He was a chopper pilot and he used to, you know, he'd go up in his chopper to try and deflect incoming Exocet missiles. But that did in many ways change the face of that conflict. And yet still, and we still see it today, and you kind of touched on this, but like your further thoughts on it that you know we tend to look at the land war the land conflict much more so than anything else so we don't give much time or thought uh to what what happens at sea now i don't know how much of this conflict is at sea or could possibly be at sea, but there is a much more focus on the conventional battles that take place on land than at sea. Very much so. The Ukrainians have very little navy left,

but they do have these missiles, and they're as effective as having the ships actually out there the sea battle is so incredibly important in this war because if the russians were to land north of odessa and then take odessa they would then hold the entire ukrainian coast ukraine is one of the great grain shippers, wheat shippers in the world. It's an enormous wheat basket, grain basket. I'm not sure in agricultural terms. It would lose that capability and devastate the Ukrainian economy. So it has to hold Odessa. The Russians, in the meantime, they have to back up their offensive in the east with fire offshore by naval ships. These naval ships now won't be able to provide quite the same protection as they did before.

So the Navy war has always been very important there. But the media are necessarily focused on the cities that have been under siege. That's where, obviously, the cameras would tend to be. They don't see the air war going on and they certainly don't see the sea war. So it's important to keep in mind when we're reading news stories of this conflict that a lot more is going on out there

that we don't really see. I would mention one other thing. You were quite right to pick up my calling the Namche missiles homemade. You were quite right to pick up my calling the napgeum missiles homemade as they were put together in a garage. I think I mentioned in one of the first broadcasts with you that Ukraine was only 10 years ago the fourth largest arms exporter in the world. It's got an enormous arms making and very sophisticated one manufacturing system on its side. It just doesn't manufacture enough for the kind of war it's now getting into.

That's interesting. That's why it needs. That's why it does need these constant resupplies from the West. Yeah, that's why what I was just going to follow that up with. If it's got such a great system, why is it begging for more arms from everyone else, including Canada? Well, for two reasons, both fairly ominous. Their weapons are good, but they're aged. A lot of them are from the Soviet era.

Now, those are still very lethal weapons, a lot of them, and they prove their worth in tanks and the rest of it at times um but they they don't make enough of them for the kind of major war we're now uh we're now moving towards in the east uh they need enormous resupply of different kinds of weapons to the war is going to change we're in phase two we're moving from a siege of the cities in built-up areas where you have suburbs and you have forests and you have fields and lots of places for enemies to hide. It's now moving to the east where two major forces, the Russians and the Ukrainian forces, are basically going to face each other off in a landscape that looks often like Saskatchewan, sort of flat forest, but not forest, a farming area. it's going to mean much more

concentration of forces, much more reliance upon heavy artillery or multiple rocket firing devices, radars that can pinpoint enemy artillery sites and therefore have a counter barrage. It will need much more anti-aircraft capabilities to keep the russian planes from coming over and attacking built up concentrations of ukrainian troops so everything is going to be needed in much more scale than we've seen today and remember it has to come in from the polish border which is all the way over on the west of Ukraine to the very east. And that's got to come in under threat of attack by Russian cruise missiles, by other precision weapons, by drones, and by increasing number of Russian aircraft raids.

So unless we get the Ukrainians get more anti-air missiles, anti-air artillery devices, anti-radar devices, all of those things, they're going to be in a very, very tight corner within a matter of two or three weeks from now. You know, you use the phrase a major war, that we're in a major war, witnessing what's unfolding in and around Ukraine. And I want you to expand on that for a little bit, because I think, you know, we tend to think of major wars as, you know, conflicts like, you know, World War II. And we tend to dismiss others as kind of regional conflicts.

And I think in some ways some are suggesting oh okay that you know this is a big deal but it's a regional conflict really but is it when you use the term major war what what are you thinking well i'm thinking it's not like the limited wars we we would the russians for instance fought in Syria or the Americans in Iraq or in Afghanistan and where you you take the country with fairly limited fighting at the beginning there was the Russians of course were invited and they didn't take anything but they were fighting it to run part of it and then it becomes a kind of counter insurgency war by and large where you don't use the great battalions and brigades and divisions

en masse you you move in smaller numbers in counter-insurgency warfare policing operations very often very limited air raid needs on capabilities even the enemy are often gone to ground and hard to find. All of that is somewhat limited. So the officers don't get a lot of training. And what a major war I'm talking about is the use of big, big numbers like a whole. It's estimated that Russia has something like, you know, I think it's close to 80 battalion tactical groups now. These are groups, each one of them about a thousand, but usually around 700. So we're really dealing 40 to 50,000.

The Ukrainians have at least 12 of their battalions in there. So we're dealing with 40, 50,000 in much more concentrated area. You're using vast numbers of armor, tanks, armored personnel carriers of all kinds, heavy missiles, heavy artillery, radar systems. All of that are brought into play at once. And it takes on not quite the scale, of course, of the Second World War, where we saw

armies of millions coming together on the Western Front and even almost tens of millions on the Eastern Front. But here you will be seeing what are, for our modern scale of war, very large numbers. And this is quite rare to see. Even in Vietnam, you didn't see many major actions of several, say, American brigades operating together. It was one brigade against a northern Vietnamese half division or something like that. This is going to be much more like a conventional war, I guess you would call it, more of the on-the-ground conventional, where all systems have to be brought into play at once and this is where i think the ukrainians have a real advantage because they've been trained for eight years by nato to a very high technical capability of command and control and radar and

the rest of it uh and they've been trained to work in both large numbers but also in very very small numbers where the russian training has been very lacking, and they don't have anything like the professionalism of the NATO training. They've even admitted that themselves. I mean, this is not something people are saying about the Russians. They've had a goal for years now to get more up to a more professional officer corps. They don't have NCOs in large numbers, the sergeants. They're the backbone of modern armies.

This is putting a lot of things together, but this is what I'm talking about. Major war means putting a lot of things together, not a raid on this town or a raid on that town, not taking open Laden, not seizing control of one province. This is bringing together your armor, your artillery, your rockets, your cruise missiles, your command and control systems, your radar systems. And all of that's going to come together in a situation where this is interesting. The Russians have an enormous amount of equipment,

but they don't have enough soldiers. The Ukrainians, because they're a nation of 44 million in Ukraine, have plenty of soldiers to rely upon, but they don't have enough equipment. So they have complete opposites coming together. It's very interesting that the Russians have so few infantry that it's been pointed out time and again that they have lots of the armor and move personnel moving around in armored vehicles and the rest of it when it comes to ground soldiers the grunts that go forward and attack and take out positions uh they're they're really quite limited to some thousands and they get chewed up very very fast in battle that's the you and i have all seen with units that have been in a conflict zone too long it's not too long

before the weariness takes over and mistakes happen and the rest of them and they begin to lose morale i think the russian position right now is they're they're they're entering a major conventional front war on eastern Ukraine, but without sufficient manpower, and it is manpower for them, and not enough reserves that they can call upon, that they can train up to any kind of combat standard in the amount of time facing them. So I'm not sure what they're going to do, except they're going to rely incredibly heavily on artillery and i think more air attacks and that is again where ukrainians have to be able

to counter that otherwise they they could get encircled in the east or they could have to retreat very fast from the east which would be disaster all right this has all been fascinating brian as it always is talking to you um we're just about out of time, but let me just close the loop on this by bringing up the one area that we haven't talked about and gets very little attention really is what is going on in the air in terms of the air war i mean leaving leaving the missiles aside in terms of actual air war that were the more conventional type of uh that we tend to think of in terms of of the air is there anything happening certainly nothing like the battle of britain if we have an imagination of that or the big the big and uh and saber jet fights over korea and stuff like that the russians are upping their number of sorties that's one mission per one plane uh at a time to something like up to 200 250 now which is getting to a fair bet but it's still not a day that's a day in a day in a day yes and but the

ukrainians are only actually mounting about up to 10 or 15 per day, which shows far less. But what's interesting in both these cases is both of them are doing far less than they could. The Russians are being extremely cautious. They are reluctant to come across the border very much because they're very fearful of the missiles that the Ukrainians have, both the S-300s, which are high altitude, and a lot of the shoulder-fired and smaller missiles that can take out planes up to 20,000 meters, 18,000 feet, that range. They've lost about 20 planes already. That's a lot for them.

The Ukrainians are also flying far fewer than the planes they seem to have. And the reason is both sides are husbanding their resources. They realize that this air war could become very, very intense. And the Ukrainians have not wanted to fritter their planes away in individual attacks that achieve very little. They want to keep a strategic reserve of enough planes to make a big impact in one day in a surprise attack, say, on Russian concentrations. And the Russians are very weary, wary, I should say, of the ground anti-air capability Ukrainians have. The Russian force, too, suffers a bit, but their pilots are not, again, as well trained up to NATO standards.

They have many fewer flying hours per year, and they're not as adept with handling the very extraordinarily complex role that a modern fighter pilot, bomber pilot has to be trained up to and they have to look after you know encounter counter-attic aircraft the local ground support that kind of stuff all at once while you're keeping an eye out for a possible missile coming at you or an enemy aircraft coming at you it's extremely complex and i think the russians are feeling they've got to do a lot more quick trick training before the big air battles that might be coming, say, three weeks or a month from now, as the war in the east, if it does really escalate, if it gets to that point, which I have a fear, I'm very fearful it will. Well, I guess the next few weeks and months are going to give us the answer to those questions. Brian, as always, you've been a great help

in trying to understand some of the things that are going on here, and I've got to tell you that from the mail I get at the bridge, you are certainly appreciated. Oh, that's very nice to hear. And look forward to by our listeners each week. So take

care, and we'll talk again soon. Will do, Peter. See you soon. Brian Stewart talked to us once again. His take on his commentary on what's happening on the Ukraine war and what Brian always does is he looks for those angles and those stories that either aren't being talked about at all or aren't being talked about in his view enough. And that's what we ended up with today, very much so. The other thing I should mention about Brian, you know,

he's been a longtime friend of mine, as all of you know, since the early 1970s when we first met on a training course at the CBC. And so I've learned a lot over the years from Brian. Today, today is his 80th birthday and he and his wife Tina are in London, down in London, England, for a week's break and seeing some of the great places that Brian,

as a former foreign correspondent based in London, used to kind of hang out in, and some of the friends that he knows and stays in contact with in the British capital. So happy birthday to Brian, and thank him once again for taking a few minutes out from his birthday to talk with us here on the bridge. All right, it's time to wrap it up, but we've had a kind of heavy duty last couple of days. Yesterday, bringing us up to date on COVID. Today, bringing us up to date on the situation in Ukraine. So I wanted to leave with something.

I don't know whether it's a lighter, but it's certainly not as heavy as those two subjects. Have you ever been in a situation where you're checking out somewhere? It could be the grocery store. It could be a clothing store. It could be wherever. And you can't find your credit card. And you want to pay by credit. And you've mis find your credit card. And you want to pay by credit.

And you've misplaced it somewhere. Either you've forgotten your wallet totally or your purse, or you just can't seem to find it in the kind of mess of your organized, what you thought was an organized display of cards in whatever carrier you use. Anyway, the bottom line is you don't have it with you, so you've got to do hoops and jumps to figure out how you're going to pay. That is not the situation for a 37-year-old fellow by the name of Patrick Palman, who lives in the Netherlands.

And why is that? Well, it's because Patrick is one of 500 people in the world at the moment who have taken advantage of a situation where they have their credit card, or at least that little part of the credit card that identifies you and has all your personal details and your credit information, the chip, he has that chip implanted in his hand. Now, if you look at your hand, between the thumb and the index finger, there's that kind of soft, plushy part. That's where they've implanted a chip, his credit card information on a chip in there.

He had it done a few years ago, 2019. And that's how he pays for everything. He just, you know, same way we hold our card up over that little machine and hope that it connects, he just puts his hand there. Wherever he is, grocery store, bookstore, clothing store, movie theater, basketball game, whatever. Now, I'm not sure I want to do that. It says there's nothing to it. It's like the actual operation of implanting the chip is kind of like pinching your skin. But the whole idea of having a chip inside your body, I'm not sure about that idea at all.

I like the idea of not worrying about whether or not I've forgotten my wallet or lost my wallet, but I'm not so sure about having a chip in there. It sounds a little bit too much to me. However, it's out there, and the company that's making them is starting to sell them. The test case, that's how Patrick got it, and now they're selling the stuff. It's out there, and as I said, there are about 500 people around the world who have it now.

We'll see how successful that is. There's one for you to think about. All right, a couple of mentions. Tomorrow, Good Talk. Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson join us. There's one for you to think about. All right, a couple of mentions. Tomorrow, good talk. Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson join us. And there are clearly things to talk about on the national political front. And we'll get right at it with Chantelle and Bruce and their weekly column they had last week off for Easter. So it'll be good to reconnect with them.

And coming up next week, I had many, many requests about this. About six weeks ago, and we repeated it in the Encore editions last week, we had Jerry Butts and James Moore. Jerry Butts, former principal secretary to Justin Trudeau. James Moore, former cabinet minister for Stephen Harper. We had them together talking about kind of political conditions in Canada and trying to do it from a nonpartisan way, but basically by being informative about the process and how to make it better and less partisan.

So we're going to try it again next week. And I'm really looking forward to that. I'll tell you the subject matter next week when we're coming up to it. But Butts and Moore on the bridge once again. That'll be next week. Okay, I'm Peter Mansbridge. This has been The Bridge for this day, this Thursday. Thanks so much for listening.

And we'll talk to you again in just 24 hours. Thank you.