The Bulwark Podcast - Christopher Miller: The War Came to Us

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

A one-time Peace Corps volunteer, Chris Miller was posted to Ukraine, fell in love with it, and decided to stay. Now, he's one of the best Ukraine correspondents. Miller joins Charlie Sykes to discuss Zelensky, the state of the war, and Ukraine's existential fight. show notes: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/war-came-to-us-9781399406857/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. October is the season for wearing masks and costumes, but some of us feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to, at work, in social settings, around our family. Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts of yourself, so you can stop hiding and take off the mask. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Therapy is a great tool for facing your fears and finding ways to overcome them.

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center in the 2024 election. There is no indication the Republican Party has decided that it is, this is the moment to move on from the twice impeached, disgr disgrace, defeated, and now four-time indicted former president. So if you subscribe to Morning Shots, we have a pretty complete rundown of many of the reads that I think that you might find helpful. Vox asking, is Trump going to jail? And they provide a list of all the criminal charges and the potential prison time, ranking the indictments in order of importance. The Washington Post, why Trump might fear the Georgia indictment the most. Well, why? Prison, no pardons, RICO, mugshots, bail restrictions, television.

What the heck happened in Coffey County, Georgia? Anna Bauer from Lawfare has an account of this weird sort of Keystone Cops effort to tamper with the voting machines, to access the voting machines. And of course, here's a reminder that we're going to be talking about Ukraine today. We're going to be talking about the war, but tomorrow we are going to have another episode of the Trump trials, which will be a deep dive into all of all of this. In the bulwark, Will Salatin has a piece, what's actually new in the Georgia indictment. We have Phil Rotner, the beating heart of the Georgia indictment, which is the fake elector scheme that

was not really a contingency plan. It was an action plan. The New York Times looks at the whole question of how far is Trump going to go in bullying, intimidating, and baiting the judges, biased, corrupt, deranged, Trump's taunts, test limits of release. A lot of lawyers are saying that if Trump was anybody else, just an ordinary American citizen issuing those attacks, he'd be in jail by now. The Daily Mail chronicling Trump's disaster diary for 2024, the former president will have to fit in his many criminal trials amid a very busy campaign schedule. The Wall Street Journal has a piece on one of the, I don't want to use the words like tragic, but there is something, there's something like a Greek tragedy that Rudy Giuliani, who built his entire career using RICO, gets indicted

on the law that he made famous. Also, interesting phenomenon, while Republicans all across the country continue to lose their minds over all of this, the Republican Party in Georgia is different. I mean, let's be honest about it. I mean, Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, is hitting back against Trump's lies. Trump is saying that he's going to have this big press conference where he's going to make these big reveals about stealing the Georgia election. Brian Kemp just slam dunked him. He put out a tweet yesterday. The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen for nearly three years now.

Anyone, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward under oath and prove anything in a court of law. Our elections in Georgia are secure, accessible and fair and will continue to be as long as I am the governor. You're having another moment among the anti-anti-Trump folks who are, I think, realizing that their effort to prop up Rhonda Sandis might not be working. So there's a sense of kind of urgency slash panic. You have a baseball crank writing in the New York Post, people, it's time for the Republicans to move on from Donald Trump. If only they'd been warned. Noah Rothman in the National Review, it is time for Republicans to come to terms with Trump's legal peril. The former Republican Lieutenant Governor in Georgia, Jeff Duncan, has a piece in the Washington Post where he says the

Georgia indictment should be a turning point. Whether it will be, we just don't know. Also, I think that as we sort of brace for what the next year and a half is going to be, and it's going to be rough, I think this is part of the challenge of going through this next year and a half where if you think our politics have been insane up until now, it's nothing compared to what we are going to be having, including, you know, again, the lies, the conspiracy theories, the threat of violence, and of course, this festival of hypocrisy. And I go through some of the things that have been happening just in the last several days, you know, the Republicans who demanded, demanded, demanded that the Attorney General name a special counsel in the Hunter Biden case that they,

in fact, they wrote a letter saying Merrick Garland must appoint David Weiss to serve as special counsel. Last Friday, Merrick Garland appoints David Weiss to serve as special counsel. The exact same Republicans who demanded it are now attacking it. So it's like that was then, and this is now. I also, again, in Morning Shots, kind of highlight what's going on with folks like the boy philosopher of the right, Ben Shapiro, who, like so many other members of the right-wing ecosystem, are saying how terrible it is that the criminal justice system has been weaponized against the felonious cult leader. And he tweeted out, whatever you think of the Trump indictments, one thing is for certain, the glass has now been broken over and over again. Political opponents can be targeted

by legal enemies. Oh, really? See, that turns out to be really awkward because Ben Shapiro had actually written a whole book calling for the criminal prosecution of Barack Obama. I mean, there was nothing subtle about it. The title of the book is The People vs. Barack Obama, the criminal case against the Obama administration. And guess what statute Ben Shap, Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organization Act, should be used to go after Barack Obama. So once again, shamelessness being not just a superpower, but apparently a way of life. So we are going to spend a lot more time tomorrow and Friday going back over all of this. But I thought today would be a good day to take a deep breath and step back and look around at the real world. Because while this is going on, as America devours itself politically, culturally, legally, there are real issues in the world. There are bears in the forest. There are people who are fighting for their freedom and for

their independence. And for them, it is a matter of life and death. So today we are going to be joined by the author of one of the most important new books about Ukraine. Christopher Miller is correspondent for the Financial Times based in Ukraine. He has been reporting on that country for more than a decade, and he is the author of the new book, The War Came to Us, Life and Death in Ukraine. I usually don't do this. I usually don't read the blurbs that the publishers put on the back of the book, but this one I wanted to share. When I want to know what is happening in Ukraine, I turn first to Christopher Miller's reporting. Whether it is the latest information from the front lines of

Russia's war against Ukraine, insightful analysis of the political maneuverings in Kiev, or understanding into what the average Ukrainian is thinking about current events, Miller always has the inside track. Now, in his riveting book, The War Came to Us, this foremost export on the region takes us back over the last 12 years, providing the history, the culture, and the context to help us understand where Ukraine is today and what might come next, a must-read for those who want to get beyond the headlines. And that is Marie Yovanovitch, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and authors of Lesson from the Edge. I think you'd remember that. So that is a damn, damn impressive blurb.

Christopher, welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. Thank you for having me on. It's great to be here. Let's start with a big question, because your book deals with so much, and I want to get into the political culture, the issues of corruption, oligarchy, the state of the war. But let's start with this sort of meta question. Why does Ukraine matter? Why are we talking about Ukraine? Yeah, I think that's a really important question and a good one to start with. You know, there is a lot of, I think, questioning why this war should be paid attention to by us in the West, in particular the United States. And I think it's important to understand that this is a huge country. It's the size of the U.S. state of Texas.

It plays a large role in that of global security, European security. It is the largest country within the continent of Europe. It is a place that is fighting for principles on which our country was founded and which those of us here in the United States, I'm currently taking some time off here. We care very much about independence and freedom, and that is what Ukrainians are fighting for. For them, it's an existential fight. It's obviously one of survival. But for us in the United States and in the Western world, you know, this is important for us to essentially put our money and our support where our mouth is. We say that we want to defend democracies around the world. Ukraine is a burgeoning democracy. It has a population of 40 million

people who very much want to be more than ever before, largely thanks to Vladimir Putin and his plans for Ukraine largely backfiring, wants to be a part of the European Union. It's again, a burgeoning democracy. And I think that's something that we should care about. And more so just to take it even a step further, I think if Vladimir Putin and Russia is not stopped in Ukraine, there is a great concern that Russia could try to take a few steps further into Europe and possibly attack in other various ways the European Union and certainly continue to try to undermine our system of democracy here in the United States. I'm always struck to be reminded

that Ukraine is the largest European country fully within the borders of Europe that is the size of the state of Texas. It's not just some random small country. So there is a narrative out there. And again, you know, as Americans are learning and dividing over the question of Ukraine, there is the whole question of, well, what about the oligarchs? What about the corruption? And you know that there is that narrative out there, you, what about the oligarchs? What about the corruption? And you know that there is that narrative out there, you know, that the billions of dollars that we're sending to Ukraine are going to the oligarchs and corrupt businessmen. And there's a long tradition of corruption hanging over Ukraine. So can you talk to me a little bit about that? I know we're

getting a little ahead of ourselves, but that's one of the questions that comes up. But what do we not know about Ukraine? And is it really the pristine democracy that it's portrayed as being? Yeah, that's a great question. And certainly one that is on everybody's mind right now as the US debates, you know, how much to continue supporting Ukraine. You know, the interesting thing about this war is that these powerful tycoons and oligarchs have largely been sidelined. Many of them, for example, Rinat Akhmetov, who was at times viewed as a pro-Russian businessman. He was responsible for the rise of Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president that was ousted in 2014 and fled to Russia. You know, he's become much more of a pro-Ukrainian businessman. He's lost a lot of his assets and wealth over the course of the last year and a half. So any,

you know, Russian sympathies or business ties have largely been cut off. And now, you know, he's very much on the side of Ukraine winning this war, and he's invested millions and millions of dollars in the defense of Ukraine, in the reconstruction of the company. And so I think that's worth noting. And there's still plenty of reasons to criticize him and certainly, you know, his past and other oligarchs. But broadly speaking, many of these oligarchs have actually lost influence in the last year and a half. And we've seen the rise of new, younger, very democratic-minded individuals and businessmen who are now wielding a lot more influence in Ukrainian society. And President Zelensky himself and also the people working within his administration, as well as the Ukrainian parliament, continues even in wart, to pass and implement reforms aimed at stamping out deeply entrenched corruption in the country. And there are some very, very

active Ukrainian activists who continue, despite the war, to go after corrupt entities within the country. They're lobbying support in Washington and other Western capitals for assistance in trying to, again, stamp out this corruption. So there's this parallel fight that's happening. While soldiers are fighting and dying, trying to defend the country on the front line, there is this ongoing anti-corruption fight in Kiev and across the country. And we saw some sweeping actions taken by Zelensky last week to dismiss all of the heads of the military recruitment centers who had been taking bribes from young men who wanted to flee the country so they wouldn't be mobilized.

Let's talk about President Zelensky because this is one of the most fantastically bizarre stories in European political history. A guy who is a TV star, is a comedian who actually stars in a television show about being elected president and then goes on and is elected president. You know, you've watched him. You've watched him go from being a showbiz star to being a politician to being kind of a Churchillian figure. So tell me about Vladimir Zelensky, his strengths and his weaknesses. Well, he has this uncanny ability to connect with people. And we saw that even before he became president. But I think that's certainly one of the things that has had great appeal

and made him as popular as he is today. You know, as a comic actor, he was widely popular, you know, he was recognized all over the country. You know, interestingly, he was never really involved politically in the country. And even in 2013 and 2014, during the Revolution of Dignity, which had been known at the time as the Euromaidan, he sort of sat and watched from Krivi Riga and Kiev, where he split his time, and didn't really actively participate in that, nor did he really actively participate in a lot of the support for the defense of the country after Russia's first invasion in 2014. He was very much a businessman. He remained focused

on that, his entertainment group, his widely popular television show where he became president. But it was that show that actually, I think, helped people certainly to think, you know what, this extremely charismatic guy, while being a comedian, is really onto something here. In this television show, he becomes president after a student of his, he plays a history teacher, just sort of an everyman history teacher who's very likable and goes on this rant about how, you know, entrenched corruption in the country is destroying Ukraine. And this video goes viral. And the oligarchs who are trying to find a new person to sort of mold and shape as their own and put in power, rig the election to make him president. And he doesn't realize this at the

moment. And it looks like a popular election. He's won democratically. And he gets into office and he defies these oligarchs by doing, you know, essentially what he said he would do on this viral video by stamping out corruption and attacking these oligarchs. And let's just remind people, we're talking about the TV show. We're talking about the show. Right, right. And so, you know, the funny thing is, this is, it was so surreal. You know, he was, this was a TV show called Servant of the People. And so he became so wildly popular that when he launched his presidential campaign, he named his political party after the television show Servant of the People.

And the theme music for the television show was also that of his campaign. And so when I saw him for the first couple of times campaigning in early 2019, there was this weird moment where he stepped into the room to the music played by his television show. And you weren't really sure if you were seeing Vasily Goloborodka, the TV president, or Volodymyr Zelensky. And speaking with his campaign staff, they were like, this is what we want. We want people to feel like it's the same man. So what did you think of this? Did you take it seriously back then? It was hard to take it seriously at first because, you know, he had no political experience. This was

a country where it really had an old guard political class that still was very influential. And it was a country at war. And so there was this big question hanging over him, you know, whether he could be a good commander in chief. And at the time, President Petro Poroshenko had managed the country for several years in wartime. He had strong relationships with Western leaders. But Ukrainians, who really, really like change, and have only once ever in their independent history since the collapse of the Soviet Union, reelected a president, saw Zelensky as an opportunity to move in a different direction. He was, you know, certainly campaigning on populist messages, and people were fed up with the sort of militaristic nationalism that had emerged in the latter part of the Poroshenko administration. And Zelensky

actually campaigned on the issue of finding a solution to the war, to Russia's war against the country. And so they felt as though, you know what, this is an opportunity perhaps to maybe find an end to this war that at that point had been, you know, going on for more than five years after he was elected. And so he became this president, he was widely popular, he earned more than 70% of the vote in the presidential election. But in Ukraine, as often as the case, you know, his star faded over time when he couldn't produce many of the results that he had promised on the campaign trail, the biggest of which was finding an end to this war. So then we get to February 2022. And of course, you know, he makes what I think and many Ukrainians believe is the most important decision of his political career.

And that was to stay in Kiev. And he filmed this video where he says, I'm here. I'm with my staff. We're not fleeing. The Russians can try what they want. We're going to defend our country. Extraordinary moment. It was.

But going back a little bit earlier, he didn't really believe that there was going to be an invasion. He had intelligence services, including the United States, telling him, you know, the Russians are going to invade. And they didn't believe it, right? I mean, your sources were saying that the administration thought that there might be an attack, not an invasion. It would just be limited to southeastern Ukraine. And Zelensky was actually complaining about these warnings about it. So he didn't get that right beforehand. Yes and no. You know, he was, they were wrong in the sense that, you know, they didn't believe that the types of Russian forces that were surrounding Ukraine's border and the number of those forces were enough and the right ones to be successful in launching the blitzkrieg

on Kiev that the Russians would eventually launch an attempt, right? Essentially, he interpreted their own intelligence in Ukraine and Western intelligence differently. They believe that an attack would be on a large scale, but it would be focused on the east and the south. Russia would want to try to take the southern regions of Kherson, the rest of Donetsk Oblast and Zaporizhia Oblast, these regions in the south that border Ukrainian Crimea, which Russia has occupied since 2014, and try to create this land bridge connecting Russia with the rest of these territories. And he wasn't wrong. You know, Russia did invade coming north from Crimea and heading west from

Russia through these territories. And I also believe that this would happen in a very similar way. And that's why I was in the eastern city of Kramatorsk on February 24th, when the first missiles came crashing down on the airfields there. In Kiev, Zelensky's office, with the exception of a couple of people, did not believe that the Western warnings of a full-scale invasion, including an attempt on the capital, would happen. It just seems so outrageous at the moment. And, you know, I think ultimately Ukrainians were in some ways proven right. The Russians really bungled this invasion and they did a lot of things wrong. They made a lot of mistakes in those first hours and days, especially the ground forces that attempted to surround Kiev and tried to essentially decapitate the government.

You know, they were using maps that were more than 30 years old. They were running into roadblocks and bridges and dams that didn't exist in Soviet times. You know, they were just making one bad decision after another. You and your listeners will probably remember these long snaking columns of military vehicles heading toward Kiev. And that looks intimidating in a video and from the air, but from the ground, you know, the Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers who ran to defend the country against these columns, you know, for them, these were easy targets. you know, they would take out, they would use American Javelin anti-tank missiles to take out the front vehicle, to take

out a middle and an end vehicle, and then the rest were essentially just stuck. And it was a shooting gallery for them, you know. And so in some ways, the Ukrainian analysis was accurate in thinking that the Russians wouldn't be able to take Kiev. And also, I think one thing that's also important to note is that the Russians believed a lot of their own propaganda. And Vladimir Putin had a lot of yes-men around him who were saying when asked, you know, the Ukrainians want to be, quote-unquote, liberated from this, you know, brutal Zelensky regime. Ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in the country are being persecuted on a daily basis. They're going to welcome you with open arms when you roll in. And so the Russians came in with three days worth of food and water and their parade uniforms, thinking that they were going to celebrate in a large military parade down

Central Khrushchev Street and Independence Square in less than a week. And of course, that didn't happen. So let's just go back to Zelensky for a moment. I want to, we'll come back to the details of the war and how it's played out. But you mentioned one of the pivotal moments when he decided that he was going to stay, that he was not going to flee, he was not going to follow the example of the president of Afghanistan. And then he recorded that video, which was the first of many of the videos. His ability as a communicator seems really crucial here that he was able to mobilize world opinion in an incredible way that was not inevitable when you look back on it. And it's hard well, you're much more familiar with this. It's hard for me to imagine any other Ukrainian leader being able to mobilize the West to be able to have the kind of international sympathy or to use all the different tools of communication, including propaganda, to rally

the world to Ukraine's side and to tell that story. I mean, I don't know how involved he is as a military leader, but that seems to be his real decisive contribution. Is that a fair take? Absolutely. I think that's fair. He is, in many ways, very much a military leader. And I have it from him and his office that he's a very, very hands-on leader. He likes to be involved in every decision, for better or worse. And there have certainly been times where he has overridden some of his generals to make a much more of a political decision. I think in staying to fight and

defend in Bakhmut, for example, this really grinding war or battle of attrition, you know, that was very much a decision that he made. But he has this ability, because he's not a seasoned politician, to not really speak from a script, but to speak from the heart and make these really emotional appeals that I think connect not only with leadership in the West, but real ordinary citizens who then take to social media and say, we need to support the Ukrainians. Look what the Russians are doing over there. This is what the president is saying. These are the images that are coming out of the country. His office is filled with people who worked for his entertainment company. They're very quick to turn around, you know, these really slickly produced videos that

are not the type of propaganda that we look at and say, oh, this is clearly, you know, just government messaging. They are very good at appealing to people's emotions and sensitivities and make this war, I think, in so many ways, one that is not being fought on these, you know, foreign battlefields, but feel like something that is actually really close to you. Let's go back to the beginning, because I think one of the things that comes through in your book is that Ukraine is much, much more complex than most of us could have imagined, or you could have imagined. So how did you end up in Ukraine of all places? Because you ended up there back in 2009 in Bakhmut. How did you end up in Bakhmut in 2009? And what was the city like

back then? So I applied for the US Peace Corps program in 2009. And they sent me to Ukraine in spring of 2010. So I arrived, I think, on April 1 in 2010 in Kiev. And then after a couple of months of Russian language training and cultural education, I moved to Bakhmut, which at the time was called Artsyomovsk. And, you know, I never set out to live and work in Ukraine. When the Peace Corps asked me whereomovsk. And, you know, I never set out to live and work in Ukraine. When the Peace Corps asked me where I would like to go, I said, you know, I'd really like to go someplace in Africa. It just seemed so fascinating to me. I had known some other acquaintances and family members who had served in Africa and South America. And I very much had

those places in mind, you know, when applying for the Peace Corps. So when they came back to me and said, you know, we don't have any openings there in the next several months. You could wait another year to go or we could send you to Eastern Europe. How about Ukraine? I said, sure, let's do it. And, you know, without any familial connections, without any knowledge of the culture or the languages. I arrived in Bakhmut, the only American in this city of 70,000 people that was quaint, quiet, you know, very far from the capital of Kiev, also, you know, very far away from Moscow, but just a few hours from the Russian border. It was not the place that

I originally wanted to go when I first found out that I was going to Ukraine. I had really hoped to end up in Western Ukraine, where there are these beautiful Carpathian mountains. And I thought, you know, it could be great to get lost for a couple of years in this cottage in the mountains, in the forests. And I had, you know, an interest in Crimea as well, being by the sea and also having this beautiful landscape. Eastern Ukraine was very different. And at first it looked really tough and it was sort of brutal. You know, this is a heavily industrialized region. The Soviets came in there and really built up factories and, and mines. There's sort of a layer of coal dust across the entire Eastern region because there are so many mines, both, both legal mines and illegal mines

because in some places you can actually just scrape the coal from the surface that's how prevalent it is but in bakhmut i found it was actually this this sort of diamond in the coal dust it was clean it was the streets were lined with roses there were these beautiful parks and a salt mine just up the road that largely provided for the community and thousands of jobs. There was also this champagne factory that Joseph Stalin had ordered to be created post Second World War that also employed a lot of people. And I quickly fell into a routine within the community. I became known by the local government there. I worked in schools. I became fast friends with a lot of people who had an interest in the West. But at that time, because the internet in 2010 wasn't as prevalent, really didn't have a

clear picture of how we lived and who we were. And so for them, I was, you know, their sort of window to the West. And they were very much, you know, my local educators and fixers and friends. And those relationships and that experience for two years of living there really formed the basis of my understanding for the country. And it's really when I understood that, you know, this isn't a country divided by East and West and Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers. I was meeting and speaking with people who were speaking Russian, who were speaking Ukrainian, who were speaking a

blend of the two called Sotashik, which made things a little bit tricky at first. You know, I met people of all various ethnicities from Central Asia, Eastern Europe. There was a Greek community in Mariupol. So, you know, I found a place that was really deeply complex and fascinating, which is why after two years, I decided to stay. You read in the book, the people there were equally skeptical about both Kiev and Moscow, and they identified themselves as the people of the Donbass. And you write, the Donbass, a vast wild steppe land once controlled by Cossacks, had a long history of rebelling against rulers in both Moscow and Kiev. People here valued freedom and independence above all else. They didn't want anyone telling

them what to do. So you mentioned that there's a mixture of Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers, and I kind of want to just dig down into this a little bit. There's the mythology that, you know, in Eastern Ukraine, there were these pro-Russian, Russian-speaking, you know, pockets, but obviously it's just much, much more complex than that. You know, the Russians will argue that, you know, Ukraine's not really a place. It's just sort of, it's been Russia for all along. You really are Russians. You're not really a different people. Obviously the Ukrainians disagree. And the people of Donbass are like a third way, right? I mean, it's just like, that's a mixture. That's a mess down there. Yeah, well, Vladimir Putin has said explicitly that he doesn't believe Ukrainians are a real people, that they are Russians who have lost

their way, and that Ukraine isn't a real country, and it's never been a nation. It is a place that was created by Lenin and the Soviet Union. And those things, of course, are untrue. This is Russian propaganda and the Kremlin's propaganda. And I think that is important to note because it's that propaganda and that messaging that penetrated deep into these Russian speaking areas in Eastern Ukraine and Southern Ukraine, and really, you know, got its claws into, you know, a large number of people there. And so when Russia invaded in 2014, that area, that's where they did find some sympathy. And we did see some Ukrainians who had been, you know, watching Russian television for years, because, again, it was, you know, this is an area that's very close to the Russian border. And it felt, you

know, it felt far from Kiev. And this was a place that often felt neglected by Kiev and didn't see a lot of the money that they were paying in taxes to the central government returned to be used to build their cities and infrastructure there. You know, that alienation was something that was exploited by the Kremlin in 2014. And so we saw several Ukrainians, thousands of Ukrainians who did take up arms to fight against their own country at that time. But you know, that's that is an example of the complexity. But it's also one of, you know, just how, how Russia's influence over decades had managed to influence these people and to get them to believe these messages that were

largely untrue, but had just enough of a kernel of truth in there or foundation on which the Kremlin could build this argument to them. So I'm haunted by your description of living in Bakhmut and your references to Mariupol because now is there anything left? These towns have been reduced to rubble, some of the worst, most brutal fighting taking place in those cities. Just talk to me a little bit about how you feel about this. I mean, you remember what the city was like back in 2010 and you know what it's like now. You know the people. Yeah, it's heartbreaking. I returned to Bakhmut several times over the past nine years of Russia's war there. But in the first many years, it had been a city that largely avoided conflict and fighting.

It was not smack on the front line before 2022. And what we saw from summer of 2022 till now still is this unbelievably brutal fighting, Russian airstrikes, heavy artillery duels, close quarters combat in city streets that used to be lined with roses and where, you know, children walked to school and where Ukraine's Olympians trained for track and field, where I walked through parks with my friends, you know, sipping coffee and watching people ride a Ferris wheel on holidays. All of this has been completely erased, huge apartment complexes razed to the ground. It's really unfathomable. The last time I was there was toward the end of December. And each trip that I had made through the year, things got progressively worse. The first time I arrived, I saw that the apartment where I had

lived was still intact, but the street had been badly damaged. The next time was autumn and I noticed that several more buildings and cafes that I used to frequent and a school that I worked at had been attacked and were in bad shape. By December, the roads were completely chewed up by armored vehicles. There was hardly a moment where an explosion wasn't heard. Artillery shells were crashing down all over the place. I wasn't able to spend many hours there. It was especially dangerous. And I interviewed these Ukrainian soldiers who were exhausted. They had, you know, covered in dirt. They were hungry. They were thirsty. They were cold because, again, this was December. And they described this hellish fighting at the front line where Russian forces were just sending waves of men toward them, trying to advance mere meters before being cut down by Ukrainian fire.

And then another wave of fighters being sent toward them. And I was just in shock of what this person was describing. Yeah. and he called it a meat grinder. And as we spoke, I noticed that there were some Ukrainian soldiers digging nearby. And we were standing in this square that used to be a location for city holidays or a meeting place where I would go and meet friends to later go out in the evening. And it had turned into a fortress. The city was becoming a fortress and Ukrainians were digging a trench to prepare for Russians storming the very city center. And I noted to him how crazy that looked to me to be digging a trench there. And I noted that, you know, I did see

people digging here once before. When I lived here in 2011, there was an excavation underway, and I had asked one of the diggers what they were doing, and he said, we're actually pulling up the bodies of German soldiers who had occupied Artyomovsk, which was what previously Bakhmut was called, during the Second World War. And we both just stood there in awe, and all we could do was shake our head. It was just this really surreal moment. But yes, the city has been completely razed to the ground. And unfortunately, many others have too. There's a list of them now. Mariupol is certainly one of the most well-known, but I could go on and on because the Russians have really set their sights on destroying cities.

So the title of your book is The War Came to Us. Where does that come from? Where's the phrase come from? Yeah, you know, I never set out to cover a war. I wasn't a war correspondent. I was someone who I think fell in love with Ukraine and wanted to stay reporting on the political scene and geopolitics and Ukrainian people and culture. And I was fascinated by that. And that was good enough for me. You know, I didn't go off looking to report in Iraq or Afghanistan, just like many Ukrainians, you know, did not seek out war. They did not provoke Russia. This is an unprovoked invasion of their country. And so, you know, the title is, you know, myself, Ukrainians were living in Ukraine, essentially going about our lives and business, right? I mean, I was,

I was reporting as a journalist, they were working in tech or government or education when Russia decided that, and Vladimir Putin decided that, you know, this country, this place is a place that belongs under our control. You know, we're going to use Ukraine to attack the Western world and what Vladimir Putin views as Western hegemony. And, you know, so the title really comes from this brutal, brutal war and invasion arriving without really being expected and totally unprovoked. So let's talk a little bit about the war because you describe it as a complex war in a complex place. The Ukrainian military is fascinating because as you describe it, it's a kind of a patchwork force. And, you know, it's been so creative and so impressive with what it's been able to do.

I mean, they're using Czech equipment, Iraqi equipment, American equipment, British equipment. They've got instruction manuals in half a dozen languages. They're going through a thousand drones a day. They had a famous stockpile of weapons at the beginning of the war, but they're obviously very, very heavily reliant. So what has to happen now? I mean, you write that the war is going to drag on, you know, unless the West and, you know, the U.S. government in particular are willing to provide a lot more and a lot more quickly. So where do you think we are right now?

Because there's that push-pull, we have done so much. The Ukrainians are constantly saying you need to do more. It has to be faster. So give me your thoughts about the kind of the, what I see is the kind of the tentative slow walk of the Biden administration that wants to give them sort of enough, but maybe not enough to win the war. Where are we at now? I'll paraphrase the Ukrainian foreign minister, who's a longtime acquaintance of mine. When I met him recently, what he told me when we were speaking about Western assistance and what they need and the pace of it over the past year and a half is, you know, we're tired of asking and being told no,

and then asking a second time months later and being told maybe, and then knowing that when we ask a third time months later, long after we needed this piece of equipment, finally, yes. If they would have just said yes from the start and put the process in place of delivering it, we could have done so much more early on. And we might not be in this position we are now, which is, I think, a brutal grinding war of attrition and this really crucial moment where if more assistance isn't provided, we risk seeing Ukraine and Russia's war against it slip into a frozen conflict. And that would allow Russia to really, even more than they have in recent months, solidify their frontline and their defenses, take even a stronger hold on these occupied

territories in the east and the south of the country. And also, you know, we'll be coming up against a presidential campaign in the United States And also, you know, we'll be coming up against a presidential campaign in the United States where Ukraine, of course, yeah, where Ukraine risks becoming a political issue. And the Ukrainians do not want to see that happen because, you know, traditionally Ukraine has seen bipartisan support in the United States and, you know, with the candidates who are running, particularly President Donald Trump, you know, with the candidates who are running, particularly President Donald Trump, you know, the Ukrainians are very skeptical of him and worried about the amount of support. Justifiably so. Right, right. Because, you know, they don't want a replay of 2019 when

then President Trump, you know, dangled military aid over the head of Zelensky, asking him to do him political favors. And so there is this concern that, you know, if the Ukrainians do not get a lot more, a lot sooner, this could, you know, slip in again into a frozen conflict. And, you know, they just don't have the capacity right now to produce enough shells and weaponry on their own. They're heavily reliant on the West. And Russia, meanwhile, has ramped up its production. It's definitely got a deeper bench. You know, there is three times, if not four times the amount of people in Russia. If Vladimir Putin wanted to call up a mobilization or send more troops in, he would likely be able to do that. And, you know, he has shown no indication of

stopping until he achieves his goals of seeing Ukraine broken apart. And that's what we're worried about now. Yeah. What is your sense about the status of the long-awaited counteroffensive? We don't hear a lot about it. It appears to be going slower. There are occasional reports of breakthroughs. You're watching this much more closely. Has the counteroffensive been a disappointment or were expectations excessive? The expectations were excessive. You know, the Ukrainians were expected to carry out, you know, almost the impossible against the second largest and most powerful military in the world, supposedly, right? They were told that they would need to conduct a very complex combined military forces operation

with artillery and infantry and armored vehicles and without air support. You know, the Ukrainian air force is not nearly as big as Russia's. They do not have air superiority in their country. And the West has, and the United States in particular, wanted Ukraine to conduct an operation in this manner, thinking that it could provide its best opportunity to wrest back occupied territory. But it's an operation that the United States itself would never conduct without air superiority. And the counteroffensive did get off to a rough start. The Ukrainians lost a lot of Western provided military vehicles. They've lost hundreds, if not thousands of soldiers in the past

two and a half months since the start of this counteroffensive. They've committed a lot of their Western trained and very experienced soldiers. They're having to use reserves at the moment, and they're still not having a lot of success on the battlefield. That's largely also due to the fact that Russia had months to prepare its own defenses for this counteroffensive. You know, this was a counteroffensive that everybody knew was coming, right? It was really well telegraphed. The Ukrainians had no choice but to launch a counteroffensive at some point. So the Russians spent months digging trenches, mining fields. The country is now the most mined place in the world because the Russians are spreading so many

mines. I was down on the front lines just a couple of weeks ago, and soldiers were telling me that they would come across minefields that were so dense that within like one or two square meters, they would find as many as five mines at a time. I think that the counter offensive, you know, it has not gone the way the Ukrainians have wanted, of course. I don't think that they have much of a choice other than to continue pounding away at Russian front lines and trying to achieve a breakthrough. Right now, it does look as though, you know, they are going to continue to struggle to do that. They're expending a huge amount of weaponry and ammunition at the moment, but they still

have forces that they haven't yet committed. So I wouldn't count the Ukrainians out. Around many turns, we've seen the Ukrainians outperform our expectations. And they do have this really uncanny ability to overperform and to surprise us. And so I think that, you know, we should continue supporting them and certainly not count this counter offensive out yet. You put your finger on it, though, that offensives like this usually rely on air support. And we would never try an attack like this without air superiority and air support. And that has been lacking. Of course, the Ukrainians have been saying this for months, give us the air support. And apparently that's going to happen, but it's been delayed and it's been slow. The book is The War Came to Us, Life and Death in Ukraine.

Christopher Miller is correspondent for the Financial Times based in Ukraine, who has been reporting on the country for more than a decade. It is an extraordinary piece of work. Congratulations, Christopher. And thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Oh, thank you for having me. It was a pleasure to speak with you. And thank you all for listening to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be

back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.