Anatol Lieven, a former war correspondent and director of the Quincy Institute’s Eurasia Program, set out to Ukraine last month for some on the ground reporting, and got a bit more than he bargained for.
After spending several days in Kyiv and Bucha he had an accident in Zaporizhia, the target of regular Russian bombardments, and spent a week in hospital there. It turned out to be interesting field work.
Lieven is back in the UK, and I was able to pin him down for an interview, in which he discusses Russian missiles, message management, and Ukrainian public opinion ahead of an expected counter-offensive.
Vlahos: Thanks for joining me, Anatol. You went to Ukraine for research last month. Where did your travels take you?
Lieven: I started out in Kyiv, and spent three days visiting Bucha and other towns north of Kyiv where there was fighting at the start of the Russian invasion a year ago and where a majority of the reported Russian atrocities took place. In southern Ukraine, I visited the cities of Dnipro and Zaporizhia. And in Zaporizhia, I had a stupid accident — it was nothing to do with the war — which landed me in Municipal Hospital No.5 with broken ribs and a punctured lung.
Not an experience I would like to repeat, but it did allow me to have some long, relaxed conversations with fellow patients and the nurses, and it also allowed me to monitor the Russian air campaign against one Ukrainian city, which was very interesting. And then when they let me out of hospital, I was transported back to Kyiv again, where I spent a few more days recovering but also having meetings. So in all I spent three weeks there.
KV: So what did you glean from some of those conversations?
AL: Various things struck me when talking to military veterans. One was the extent to which the war in the east has become a very bloody stalemate. It's a war of artillery, but it's also a war of mines. One of the reasons why the front doesn't move much is that the ground is absolutely infested with mines, both anti-personnel mines and anti-tank mines. And as one soldier said, the Russian approach now is not ‘human waves’ as has sometimes been described in the Western media. The Russians will pound and pound with artillery, in which they have superiority, and then if they think they have crushed the Ukrainian positions, will send in small groups of soldiers to try to occupy them, after which they will bring up reinforcements. In Bakhmut and surroundings, the Russians no longer often use tanks, because the Ukrainians have destroyed so many of them. And usually, because by now the Ukrainians are very well dug in, the Russians take casualties and turn back, or blow themselves up on mines. So this has become a grinding war of attrition.
KV: Now, we're hearing a lot of stories here about desperate recruitment measures on behalf of Ukrainians. Did you get a sense that's the case?
AL: The soldiers I talked to all claimed very high morale in the army, and determination to fight on until complete victory. But I did hear in Kyiv that there are chat rooms on Telegram, the online chat service, where young men can tip each other off about areas where the Ukrainian police are trying to round up young men who have so far avoided conscription. This does show an unwillingness to serve in sections of the young male population.
The other thing which came out very much from my time in Kyiv, was the extent to which the wealthy classes including the gilded youth are continuing to live the high life. Luxury restaurants and shops are well attended. I visited this luxury food store where there were 68 different kinds of rum — and rum is not a Ukrainian drink — and 106 different kinds of prosecco and champagne, with the most expensive going at $600 a bottle. One can imagine that this kind of thing could make soldiers returning from the front very angry indeed. Now, one doesn't know where the money for all this is coming from. But obviously it also fuels perceptions of corruption and resentment of the elites in Ukrainian society. This could be a serious factor in future Ukrainian politics.
KV: Were there any unexpected revelations that might have contradicted the beliefs you held about the state of the war going into this trip?
AL: I should emphasize that I was not allowed to go to the front line. So I did not see the cities that have been really badly damaged in ground battles, like Bakhmut, destroyed by artillery duels lasting for weeks or months — though I did see the more limited damage done by the battles a year ago to towns north of Kyiv including Irpin, Bucha and Bordyanka.
But what was most striking in the cities I visited that have only suffered Russian aerial bombardment — Dnipro and Zaporizhia — was how little damaged they have been so far. It would be possible for an uninquisitive or uninformed visitor to visit Kyiv and Dnipro without knowing that they'd been bombarded. There were destroyed buildings here and there, and others with their windows boarded up, but only sporadically — nothing like the pictures of Bakhmut or Mariupol.
And the population has become very resilient, or one might even say blasé about the risks. In my hospital, for example, nobody had bothered to tape up the windows, which is the first thing you do if you think that there's going to be an explosion nearby, to stop flying glass. Nobody in the hospital was scared, so I wasn’t either. In the cities I visited, nobody paid the slightest attention to the air raid sirens. I went to the opera one night in Kyiv and it was packed.
This reflects a number of different things. Firstly, that there are a limited number of attacks. In the ten days I spent in Zaporizhia, eleven missiles and drones were fired at the city. That seems like quite a lot, but Zaporizhia is a city of more than 700,000 people. Most fell so far away that I hardly heard them. At night I slept through them. And casualties were small: one person killed and about thirty wounded. This also reflects the great effectiveness of Ukrainian anti-missile fire, especially against drones, which though numerous are also very slow. Since the early days of the war Ukrainian anti-aircraft fire has virtually nullified Russian air superiority. However, according to the latest leaks from the Pentagon, this could now change, if the Ukrainians are indeed fast running out of anti-aircraft missiles.
Secondly, I saw clear evidence of the inaccuracy of Russian missiles — especially S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, which should not be used in a ground attack role for which they are not designed. For example, in Dnipro, the Russians clearly tried to hit the headquarters of the Ukrainian security service, missed, and instead demolished a row of shops opposite, only breaking the windows of the SBU building. In recent months, they did badly damage Ukrainian energy infrastructure in some places, but recently they have failed to do so. One reason is that the Russians are either short of ground attack missiles or keeping them in reserve against the planned Ukrainian counter-offensive. This also raises the question [of] to what extent the Russians are indiscriminately bombarding Ukrainian cities and to what extent they are missing what they are aiming at and hitting civilian targets instead.
KV: In a recent Foreign Policy article you talked about what Ukrainians were willing to tell you on the record, as opposed to off the record. Can you give us some examples?
AL: The majority of the people I talked to were saying the same things on and off the record. I certainly observed an overwhelming consensus in the Ukrainian population behind defending Ukraine and not submitting to Russian dominance. Everybody I talked to believed in resisting the Russian invasion, and most people believed in the need to fight on to complete victory and the recovery of all Ukrainian territory lost since 2014. Zaporizhia is a mostly Russian-speaking city which in the past consistently voted for parties that advocated good relations with Russia. I can assure you that there is no affection for the Russian state and army in Zaporizhia today.
However, and this has also been brought up by certain opinion polls, there were regional differences about what kind of victory Ukraine should aim at. In the Russian speaking areas, this consensus behind the need for unconditional victory was not so absolutely unanimous. And I did talk to several journalists and analysts who said in private that they thought in the end, there would have to be a territorial compromise — but all of those insisted that this be off the record.
Several people said to me that anyone who makes this argument in public is going to run very serious risks — the loss of their job if they are a journalist, the end of their political career if they're in politics, and quite likely a visit from the Ukrainian security services as well. So between the public mood which has grown up as a result of the Russian invasion and its dreadful consequences, but also to some extent being generated by the state as a result of the war and a degree of repression by the state, I would say that there are significant differences between what a significant minority of Ukrainians say in private and the public debate or lack of it in Ukraine.
Of course, this attempt to create a patriotic consensus is very normal in time of war, but it will create serious problems for the Ukrainian government if in the end they do have to agree to some form of compromise peace.
Another difference is that in and around Kyiv, there is — very understandably — a great deal of hate-filled language directed at the Russian people and Russian culture in general. In Zaporizhia, hatred is directed at the Russian government and armed forces — especially of course the air force. But since so many people there are partly Russian themselves, and with relatives in Russia, there is much less of this kind of quasi-racist talk about ordinary Russians.
KV: Thank you Anatol for sharing all of this with me.
AL: I would also like to say thank you to the Ukrainian medical staff in Zaporizhia (City Municipal Hospital No. 5), who treated me when I was injured. I was tremendously impressed by their professionalism, competence and honesty, and grateful for their kindness.
